Snap

The Greek referendum on the proposed bailout will be held three days before George Osborne's emergency Budget.

His emergency Budget, to clean up the mess left by whoever was Chancellor of the Exchequer for the five years leading up to the recent General Election.

Imagine a referendum that could be organised from scratch between this evening and 5th July. It is just as well that we had Osborne and David Cameron to rescue us from "becoming Greece".

Conduct and Character

If the truth about the Northern railways had come out earlier, then election petitions would have been submitted against scores of Conservative MPs.

Regardless of any current majority, each and every Conservative seat in the North ought to be regarded as a priority Labour target in 2020.

Throw everything at them. What is union money for?

Meaning, of course, that there needs to be a Labour Leader who will keep that money coming.

The Value of Nothing?

Well, no, actually. I do not agree with the values of the people who delivered an unexpected Conservative overall majority this year. But they undeniably have them.

That majority is not despite the record of David Cameron during the last Parliament. It is because if that record. Cameron had done much of which his party's supporters approved, and nothing of which they disapproved.

In particular, by enacting same-sex marriage, which was the editorial policy of the Daily Telegraph 18 years ago when Tony Blair was ruling it out from the Despatch Box, Cameron did not only consolidate the Conservative vote.

He expanded it, by giving considerable numbers of people who agreed with him economically a sense of permission to vote for his party. Thus was victory secured.

I opposed the same-sex marriage legislation, but there is no point pretending that any substantial section of public opinion did. And what there was, was overwhelmingly Labour-voting.

Probably half of opponents were Muslims, probably half of the rest were in the Evangelical churches, more of which will have been black-majority than anything else, and very few of which in Britain correspond to the American Religious Right; Stephen Timms, Gavin Shuker and Tim Farron are quite typical of our white Evangelicals.

Beyond that were Sikhs, and Hindus (the only mostly Conservative-voting part of this body, and a very small proportion of the population even if they had all been against same-sex marriage), and around one fifth of practising Catholics.

That last is a figure of well under 200,000 people, in a country of well over 64 million. It is worth noting that to have fewer than a million weekly attendees is still to have the most of any religious organisation in this country.

But then, the social liberalisations of the late 1960s were not unpopular, either. Indeed, they were scarcely noticed even by most MPs, with great majorities simply absent from key votes such as the Second and Third Readings of the legislation on abortion and homosexuality, both, like the rest, passed by enormous cross-party majorities of those who did go through the Division Lobbies. It would be interesting to investigate how much media coverage any of it received.

At least until the foundation of the SDP, Roy Jenkins's time as Home Secretary was barely remembered, with friend and foe alike seeing his reputation as based on his time as Chancellor, followed by his role in the 1975 referendum on Europe.

He very nearly won Warrington, he did win Glasgow Hillhead twice, and he came closing to doing so a third time, in the days when the Catholicism of the North West of England and of the West of Scotland really was still dyed in the wool and bred in the bone. But those were simply not the issues. Meanwhile, most largely or heavily Catholic areas continued to vote solidly Labour, as most of those in England and Wales still do.

(Curiously enough, Jenkins's country house at East Hendred in Oxfordshire had also been a centre of Recusancy, the influence of which around it remains evident to this day.)

I am not saying that such an approach was correct. But these cannot be gainsaid as the facts. When Andy Burnham, who is not a candidate for Pope, expresses himself in favour of same-sex marriage, then he is expressing the view of most practising Catholics in this country. They are wrong. But that is the reality.

Still, like the rest of us, they are highly unlikely to agree with David Cameron economically. So, like the rest of us, they did not vote for his party.

How Wide The Gulf?

Kuwait owns much of the Royal Mail.

This country's prostration to the Gulf monarchs, the Frankensteins of the IS Monster, is a terrifying risk to our national security.

It threatens great tracts of our infrastructure, much of which we, as a nation, used to own.

As well as numerous other assets, from Harrods, to the Shard, to every branch of Sainsbury's.

We supply them with arms, and we send our own youngest and strongest to fight for them in person.

We shall be made to see our folly. Sooner rather than later.

Order Is An Enlightened Principle

Jonathan Green writes:

At the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson travelled to Paris to meet with leaders of the victorious Allied Powers. After four years of war, Europe was exhausted.

The enormous costs of the conflict were widely blamed on Europe’s decrepit, outdated class of ministers, statesmen, and diplomats. The old norms of European diplomacy stood in disrepute.

Wilson’s task, as he saw it, was to found a new order of diplomacy, one to replace the retrograde system whose breakdown led to the Great War.

This set him in opposition to defenders of the old order, who believed its principles were still relevant in their time.

One such traditionalist was William Massey, the prime minister of New Zealand, who made the mistake of approaching Wilson at the Paris conference and comparing the Allies’ position in 1919 to that of their predecessors at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

In the same way that the Congress of Vienna had crafted a stable European peace in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Massey told Wilson, the Allies now had a chance to build a lasting peace for the 20th century.

Wilson was outraged. He demanded of Massey and all others present that “even by reference, no odor of Vienna would again be brought into the proceedings” of the Paris summit.

For Wilson, the Congress of Vienna embodied everything that was wrong with the old European system of diplomacy: it conjured images of privileged elites in a smoke-filled room, cynically swapping territory with one another to sate their lust for power.

Precisely these autocratic vices, Wilson argued, were the root causes of World War I.

Wilson’s antipathy towards the Congress of Vienna was deep-seated. In a 1917 speech to the U.S. Congress he had already declared his desire to “utterly destroy the old order of international politics.”

If the mindset of 19th-century diplomacy was to blame for the war, then a durable peace could not be built on the basis of “such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna.”

Wilson envisioned a new international system that transcended the cynical power politics of the old European one, a new system rooted in the universal “principles of peace and justice.”

In order to moralize diplomacy, greed and avarice needed to be punished: Germany had to be penalized in the war’s aftermath.

The universal right of national self-determination meant that Austria’s polyglot empire must be broken up into a series of new states—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. And Wilson’s commitment to the principle of self-government led him to call for regime change in Germany and Austria.

Their old monarchical governments needed to be replaced with new republican ones.

These measures, he believed, would banish the vices of the old European diplomacy from modern international relations, paving the way for a new system of nations bound together by their shared cosmopolitan values.

 Two decades later, the world was back at war.

♦♦♦

The Congress of Vienna has long been tarred by the sort of accusations Wilson leveled against it.

Before the ink on the treaties had dried, Sir James Mackintosh, a liberal British MP, was complaining in the House of Commons that rather than liberating Europe from Napoleon’s tyranny the delegates at Vienna had simply replicated his imperial style of politics under a new, more cynical guise.

“The Congress of Vienna,” he observed, “seems to have adopted every part of the French system, except that they have transferred the dictatorship of Europe from an individual to a triumvirate.” 

To Mackintosh, Vienna represented the final death-knell of the 18th century’s liberal principles, consigning Europe to a dark period of reactionary authoritarianism.

In contrast to the noble principles of the Enlightenment—which gave rise to such emancipatory moments as the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)—the Congress of Vienna is often portrayed as a regressive moment.

With the collapse of the French Revolution, the story goes, the principles of liberty and equality gave way to divine-right absolutism.

The principle of state sovereignty was discarded, and vindictive, rapacious strong men carved up Europe’s small states and distributed the spoils amongst themselves.

Fundamental rights of conscience were violated as the Vienna delegates enacted censorship laws designed to crush all forms of dissent. The enlightened dream of a Europe of free republics gave way to a world of repressive autocrats.

What this conventional story misses, however, is how progressive—indeed, how enlightened—the Congress of Vienna appeared from the perspective of its architects.

For over two decades, from the onset of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792 to Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Europe had been mired in unrelenting war.

Sparked by the revolutionaries’ fanatical ideology and sustained by Napoleon’s estimations of his own world-historical importance, these were the most destructive wars that Europe had ever witnessed.

To the people that lived through them, they appeared not as the fulfillment but as the antithesis of Enlightenment.

The French revolutionaries may have claimed to uphold the cause of human rights and cosmopolitan fraternity, but in practice their crusade represented no less than the descent into barbarism.

According to its authors, the Congress of Vienna was an attempt to restore the enlightened world of the 18th century that the revolutionaries had nearly destroyed.

And it worked.

Amid all the moralizing criticism that has been leveled at the Congress of Vienna it is easy to forget that for an entire century, from 1815 until 1914, the framework devised by the Congress achieved exactly what its drafters intended: it extricated Europe from the cycles of recurrent warfare that marred so much of its earlier history—and which are a too-familiar feature of Woodrow Wilson’s 20th century.

By rescuing what was good and true about the Enlightenment from the revolutionaries’ attempts to twist it into a dogmatic ideology, the Congress of Vienna laid the foundations of a stable and largely peaceful 19th century.

Whatever their intentions, the French revolutionaries’ moralizing cosmopolitanism only led to war.

The Congress of Vienna is an object lesson in a different kind of cosmopolitanism, one grounded in prudence, statesmanship, and realism.

For present-day observers, two centuries on, Vienna reminds us of a vision of Enlightenment that seeks to bring order out of chaos, stability out of anarchy.

To understand the principles that informed the Congress’s proceedings, we have to return to the early years of the French Revolution.

Conventional accounts of this period usually pit two intellectual factions against each other—the revolutionaries’ conservative critics versus their enlightened apologists, hardline traditionalists versus the champions of secular reason and the rights of man.

But what this story misses is that there was a third party to these early debates, a group of political theorists who from the beginning mounted a critique of the Revolution from within the Enlightenment.

According to them, precisely what was enlightened about the 18th century was that Europe had freed itself from the religious and ideological warfare of earlier eras.

With the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, Catholics and Protestants had agreed to live peaceably alongside each other, inaugurating a new era in European history.

In the years since, states had gradually begun to see themselves as the members of a common European federation.

By the mid-18th century, it was common for political theorists to see Europe as a “republic of states,” a corporate whole whose interests transcended the particular concerns of its individual members.

Usually associated with the Swiss political theorist Emer de Vattel, this approach to international relations emphasized the need for a balance of power among Europe’s large states.

Vattel had argued that if the Westphalian system could be brought into equilibrium, individual states would be deterred from embarking on expansionist wars for empire (since no state would be powerful enough to do so successfully) and powerful states would have incentives to protect their weaker neighbors (since all states would benefit from the maintenance of the status quo).

By checking power with power, Vattel’s theory provided a realistic, hard-nosed plan for how statesmen could realize the Enlightenment’s moral vision of a cosmopolitan peace.

In the years before the Revolution, many political observers believed that Europe was moving in the direction Vattel had recommended.

An emerging balance of power between Britain, France, Russia, and the German states of central Europe had begun to reduce tensions on the continent. This had civilized interstate relations, reduced incidents of violent war, and led to increased trade.

This pacification process was not yet complete, of course, and the 18th century saw its share of violence.

Nevertheless, the sense that European relations were improving exercised a strong influence on pre-revolutionary thought.

From this perspective, the French Revolution represented a shocking reemergence of precisely the sort of dogmatic, missionary ideology that the Westphalian system was supposed to have overcome.

Writing in 1793, the Prussian philosopher Friedrich von Gentz—a fixture of the Berlin Enlightenment, a student of Kant, and some years later Metternich’s chief advisor at the Congress of Vienna—warned that the revolutionaries were planning to foist a terrible form of religious tyranny onto Europe:

The despotic synod of Paris, upheld internally by its inquisitorial courts and externally by its thousands of willing missionaries, has denounced each and every departure from its maxims as heresy and anathema, with an intolerance not witnessed since the doctrine of papal infallibility. … 

Rather than careful systems of government, slowly infused with wisdom and experience, liberté and egalité have now taken up the sceptre of the world, and … all religion, science, and art … have been banished into the night of an eternal oblivion.

Gentz’s claim was that the Revolution, not its critics, represented the real threat to moral progress.

As the Revolution militarized in the early 1790s, its critics grew warned that the spread of its animating ideology would subvert the international system, dragging Europe into the anarchy and lawlessness of a new Dark Age.

In his Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), Edmund Burke claimed that the presence of a revolutionary French state in the heart of Europe was incompatible with the survival of the Westphalian system.

If, as the revolutionaries claimed, all non-republican governments were unjust, then all the states in Europe would have to be toppled. This was a recipe for eternal war. 

Napoleon’s consolidation of power in 1804 and his expansionary wars of the 1800s and early 1810s gave credence to Burke’s claims.

Like the revolutionaries who preceded him, Napoleon did not want simply to adjust the European balance of power, he wanted to abolish it. He envisioned a Europe pacified by the benign hegemony of France.

Only if Europe was brought under the control of a single, benevolent superpower, his supporters claimed, could the continent finally be liberated from the old power politics and refashioned into a cosmopolitan world of liberal states.

Napoleon’s expansionist ambitions convinced Europe’s leaders that if the promise of Vattel’s earlier vision of Enlightenment were to be preserved, France would have to be defeated.

This was the rationale upon which Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia waged war against Napoleon throughout the 1800s and 1810s—not to conquer France but to reassert a balanced status quo.

For much of their campaign this possibility seemed a dim one, as Napoleon conquered increasingly broad swaths of the continent.

By 1812, he controlled Europe from Gibraltar to Warsaw, Copenhagen to Naples. Only Russia and Britain stood against him.

With the failed French invasion of Russia in 1812, however, the prospect of a post-Napoleonic Europe reemerged as a real possibility.

Over the next three years, as coalition armies waged a concerted campaign to defeat him, their leaders began meeting in a series of periodic talks to discuss the future shape of Europe.

Prussia was represented by its king, Friedrich Wilhelm III; Russia by Tsar Alexander; Britain by its foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh; and Austria, by its chancellor, Klemens von Metternich.

Most of these men, it is true, were monarchists who saw republicanism as a highly destabilizing form of government—not an unreasonable conclusion to draw, perhaps, from recent French experimentation.

But it is unfair to malign them as reactionaries intent on bringing back some kind of despoticancien régime.

All of these negotiators saw the central role of government as preserving an impartial rule of law—as opposed to the arbitrary rule of a despot—and they all agreed that a wide spectrum of liberties was important for maintaining a healthy political society.

After Napoleon surrendered in April 1814 he was exiled to Elba and the leaders of the victorious anti-French coalition met in Vienna to finalize their negotiations.

Their talks lasted over the next 12 months, a period that encompassed Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his dramatic but ultimately futile attempt to resurrect the French Empire.

The final treaties were signed in early June 1815, a few days before Napoleon was decisively defeated at Waterloo.

The goals of the Congress, as its leaders explained from the outset, were explicitly cosmopolitan.

By applying Vattel’s balance-of-power thinking, they aimed to construct a durable post-revolutionary peace, a system that served not only their own interests but that would stabilize Europe.

The centerpiece of the system that emerged was the so-called “general guarantee,” a promise between each of the major postwar powers—Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and France—to protect one another from threats to their stability.

Any attack on a member state, whether from domestic revolutionaries or a rogue state, would meet a concerted military response from all the rest.

This guarantee was designed as a form of deterrence, preemptively dissuading would-be Jacobins or would-be Napoleons from trying to subvert the international order.

The general guarantee would only have binding force, however, if all of Europe’s major states stood on equal footing, such that no one state was strong enough to break its pledge and attempt to gain continental hegemony.

What was necessary, these leaders recognized, was a Europe in which each state, acting alone, was too weak to be tempted into aggression but in which the whole system, acting in concert, was strong enough to ward off destabilizing threats. In practice, this principle had two major implications.

First, it meant that the Bourbons needed to be restored to the French throne.

As late as 1812 Metternich was opposed to this, thinking that a restoration of monarchy would be too destabilizing for a now thoroughly republican French society.

But as it became clear that a republican France would be too weak to suppress domestic rebellions—and so would be unable to uphold its end of the general guarantee—his skepticism was overruled.

(For the French, the decision to restore the monarchy entailed a vital legal concession that their delegate to the Congress, Talleyrand, exploited to great effect. If the Bourbons were the legitimate kings of France, the revolutionary regimes of 1789 to 1814 had to be seen as usurpers, and the post-revolutionary government could not be held responsible for their crimes. At the Congress, therefore, France was treated not as an enemy to be humbled but as yet another victim of the Revolution’s devastation. It had to return to its 1789 borders, but did not face stern financial or territorial reparations.)

Second, the Congress had to decide the fate of the various “protectorates” that Napoleon had set up in the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.

Here context was crucial.

In some cases it was possible to restore an approximation the status quo ante. The geographical and economic advantages of Spain and the Netherlands, for instance, suggested that they would be viable as independent states.

In the case of Poland, by contrast, it seemed imprudent to leave a small, vulnerable state in the crosshairs of the continent’s great powers.

A new Polish state, they feared, would almost certainly end in failure and a power vacuum. The only way to avert future conflict in the region was to partition it between Prussia, Austria, and Russia.

The question of Germany was the most sensitive.

Before the Revolution, the German-speaking areas of central Europe had been a diverse collection of city-states, territories, and provinces bound together in a common legal system called the Holy Roman Empire.

In 1806 Napoleon had abolished the empire, establishing a new, pro-French confederation and dissolving many of the small German states in the process.

None of the delegates at Vienna were interested in resurrecting the Holy Roman Empire, but it was clear that leaving Germany divided into a number of small states would leave a vacuum in the heart of Europe, tempting predatory states to exploit German vulnerability.

Yet to unify Germany into a single nation-state, as Germany’s left-wing nationalists demanded, would be to create an economic and military juggernaut that would upset the postwar balance in central Europe.

A compromise plan therefore won out, which established a new confederation that encompassed most of Germany’s small states, along with parts of Prussia and Austria.

This federation was constructed to be strong enough to deter attacks from France or Russia but too weak to wage war outside its own territories.

By wading through these difficult individual cases, the statesmen of the Congress of Vienna hoped to create a European system that could withstand challenges without descending into total war.

Over the coming decades, a series of shocks to the international system—the student nationalist movements of 1819, the socialist revolutions of 1830 and 1848—put their efforts to the test.

But as a result of the general guarantee, Europe’s statesmen were able to overcome the dangers. The result was the most peaceful century in modern European history.

The 19th-century Europe witnessed a period of steady economic growth, an outpouring of art, literature, and philosophy, and a gradual, orderly expansion of civil liberties across the continent.

It was only once this system broke down in the July Crisis of 1914—after German and Italian unification and after insurgent nationalist passions had eroded the principle of the general guarantee—that the world the Vienna statesmen built came to an end.

♦♦♦

The Congress of Vienna reminds us that not one but two traditions of cosmopolitan thought trace their roots back to the 18th-century Enlightenment.

One is a moralizing, militant worldview that seeks peace by toppling despotic regimes in the name of liberty.

It supposes that a new world order, underwritten by an enlightened hegemon, can be crafted in the wake of these conquests.

This was the dream of the French revolutionaries, of Napoleon, of Woodrow Wilson. And to a large extent, it remains the dream of today’s foreign-policy establishment in Washington.

In the past few decades America has “liberated,” in Napoleon’s sense of the term, countries across the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe.

Whether through the hard power of military force (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) or the soft power of moral cajoling and economic pressure (Egypt, Syria, Ukraine), our hope has been that regime change will produce stable liberal democracies and lead to peace.

But as the litany of failed states in our wake suggests, this approach tends to undermine the very order it seeks to moralize.

The second legacy of Enlightenment, the one witnessed in 1815, is more promising.

It recognizes that if peace depends on order and order on stability, then the moralizing power of a hegemon will not of itself lead to a peaceful world.

The central insight that animated the Congress of Vienna is that order, like liberty, is fragile.

It is contingent on political institutions and social norms and cultural prejudices and a hundred other variables that, if undermined, lead to chaos.

Order is easy to break, yet hard to build.

But if peace depends on it, then a politics grounded in prudence, caution, and realism is necessary.

To live through the traumatic experience of state failure—as all of the Congress’s authors did, and as many in the Middle East and North Africa do today—is to recognize that, in comparison to the anarchy and chaos of a civil war, order is an enlightened principle too.

Asunder?

Does the Catholic Church in the United States keep Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July liturgically? As if the violently anti-Catholic Pilgrim Fathers and the superciliously anti-Christian Founding Fathers were Saint? They were not.

"Today, America ceased to be a Christian country"? What, again? That does seem to happen an awful lot.

Today, in fact, the Supreme Court did exactly what it was set up to do, and specifically changed the legal definition from something that, incidentally, bore very little resemblance to Catholic Teaching, to something else that, incidentally, bears very little resemblance to Catholic Teaching.

None of the United States has ever had a law of marriage based in any way on that Teaching, just as no part of what is now the United Kingdom has had any such since the sixteenth century. The State has always done whatever it liked with civil marriage, just as it has always defined legal parenthood however it liked.

In doing those things, it can leave the Church alone, or it can drag us to the stake. We do not mind which. Or, at any rate, we should not mind which.

The only way to eradicate same-sex marriage is by the preaching of the Gospel, so that even if people could still it, they no longer would.

But put not your trust in princes. Or in Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Especially when they are only doing their job as the superciliously anti-Christian Founding Fathers defined it.

Opus Dei and The Left

Today is the Feast of Saint Josemaría Escrivá.

I am a convinced admirer of Opus Dei, both as a practising Catholic and as a man firmly of the Left.

Corporal mortification, to get that out of the way, is an integral part of Catholic spirituality. Catholics need to re-learn moderate self-denial on Fridays, on the Wednesdays in Lent, during Holy Week, on the eves of the Church’s greatest Solemnities, and before receiving Communion, as well as the considerable exigencies on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

These are of a piece with the cilice, which is a spiked chain worn around the upper thigh, and with the discipline, which is a small whip used on the back. Convents manufacturing such items still do a roaring trade, and the rise of Opus Dei is itself a sign that the decadent period of disdain for asceticism even within the Catholic Church is an aberration now mercifully coming to an end.

In any case, people who suggested that Ruth Kelly wore the cilice to work merely demonstrated their own ignorance. Both the cilice and the discipline are used by numeraries, who are celibate, live in Opus Dei centres, and give most of their salaries directly to Opus Dei. Kelly was and is clearly a supernumerary, as are 70 per cent of Opus Dei members, and so presumably mortifies the flesh in ways more acceptable to clever-clever opinion, though none the worse for that.

Opus Dei believes in the sanctification of the world, thus first anticipating and then implementing the Second Vatican Council. By contrast, its opponents believe in the secularisation of the Church, falsely presenting that as “the Spirit of Vatican II”.

Therefore, they oppose corporal mortification as they oppose other Opus Dei practices: beginning the day by offering it to God, daily Communion, the Rosary, the Angelus, daily examination of conscience, invocation of the Angels and the Saints, ejaculatory prayer, use of holy water, and so forth.

That is because they disagree profoundly with Opus Dei about sanctification of and through ordinary work, not least because they so look down on the people who do a great deal of ordinary work. They disagree with Opus Dei about living a contemplative life in the middle of the world, taking everything one does with liturgical seriousness, and recognising, as any orthodox Catholic must, that every experience of the true, the good and the beautiful is in fact a religious experience.

Instead, they would rather that even the Liturgy were treated with no more, or even rather less, seriousness than most people attach to a pop concert or a football match, and that even the most obviously ecstatic mystical experiences were somehow explained away by pseudo-scientific, avowedly anti-Christian means.

They disagree with Opus Dei’s, which is the Catholic Church’s, definition of Christian freedom in the Aristotelian yet profoundly Biblical terms given definitive Catholic and commonsensical articulation by Saint Thomas Aquinas, according to which the only true freedom is in accordance with the Will of God.

Instead, they would define it in secular and Modern terms, as the freedom of the individual to do as he will, provided that he agrees with them, and that he do so as the end in itself.

They disagree with Opus Dei’s (again, simply the Church’s) doctrine of divine filiation, of recognising oneself and every other human being as a Child of God. Adopted by God’s grace and thus in some sense ipse Christus, “Christ Himself”, everything we do is therefore in some sense part of the world’s redemption: the mundane is transcendent. Instead, they would rather make the transcendent mundane.

They disagree with divine filiation’s very high understanding of the dignity of each and every human life, and with its strong imperative towards evangelisation. And they disagree with its inherent imperative, both to take up the Cross, and to experience a profound joy quite unlike any momentary chemical or sexual “high” of their own formative years.

Instead, they would rather “modernise” on abortion, euthanasia and stem-cell “research”. They would rather trim Christianity and Catholicism to suit every other system of belief, though even then not with a view to converting anyone. And they would rather have instant gratification, on the cheap in every sense.

Sanctification through work, the living of a contemplative life in the middle of the world, Christian freedom correctly defined, and the recognition of divine filiation: these are the principles calling all Catholics to rediscover and renew, ever-more-deeply, our beginning the day by offering it to God, our frequent Communion, our daily examination of conscience, our ejaculatory prayer, our use of holy water, and our devotion to the Mother of God, to the Angels and to the Saints.

And, yes, our practice of corporal mortification.

All of this is whether or not we experience any vocation to join Opus Dei, undoubtedly God’s instrument in renewing the Church in this way, but even more clearly so if this renewal becomes the norm among Catholics generally, including our witness to ecumenical partners.

So much for admiring Opus Dei as a Catholic. But how can a man of the Left possibly do so?

Far from being indifferent or hostile towards the poor, Opus Dei runs ELIS in Rome, the Midtown Center in Chicago, the Moluka medical clinic in Kinshasa, the Los Pinos educational centre in Montevideo, the Braval programme of professional formation for immigrants in Barcelona, the Laguna care centre in Madrid, the Harambee 2002 project, Condoray in Cañete, the Institute for Industrial Technology in Lagos, the Guatanfur agricultural and stock raising school in Temza, the Anauco medical dispensary in Caracas, the Centenario medical clinic in Monterrey, the Informal Sector Business Institute in Nairobi, and many more besides. Google them.

Ruth Kelly was the most prominent Opus Dei politician in the world; I am not sure who now is, but it ought to be emphasised that Rick Santorum is not a member.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and former President of the Socialist International, António Guterres, has a long history in Opus Dei. Its ranks included the late Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor in Chicago. They also included the late Jorge Rossi Chavarría, sometime Vice-President of Costa Rica, and co-founder of that country’s National Liberation Party (PLN), the Costa Rican vehicle for social democracy, affiliated to the Socialist International.

Rossi co-founded the PLN as an outgrowth of his work as legal advisor to the Costa Rican Confederation of Workers of Rerum Novarum, Rerum Novarum being the 1891 founding text of Catholic Social Teaching with its very strong critique of unbridled capitalism, a critique continued and expanded by every Pope since.

Opus Dei still includes, among others, Antonio Fontán, Paola Binetti, Llúis Foix and Mario Maiolo. We may or may not count the Catalan nationalism of Xavi Casajuana as part of the Left, but it is undeniably a very long way from Franco.

Most of the Chilean “Chicago Boys” were not members of Opus Dei. Pinochet himself never had any affiliation with it. Of six right-wing Opus Dei politicians listed on Wikipedia, four are dead, one since 1966. Whereas the three broad left-wingers listed, including two women, are all still alive.

So, insofar as it has a political orientation, Opus Dei’s would seem to be towards the Left, if anything. Much like the Catholic Church Herself, in fact. That is yet another reason to hope, work and pray for the Catholic Church at large to become much more like Opus Dei.

After all, it was greatly admired by Blessed Oscar Romero, as explained by Filip Mazurczak in an article that I have been quite unable to cut, and to which I have added emphasis:

On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot during the celebration of Mass by the death squadrons of El Salvador’s military government.

Today his reputation is undergoing a second assassination: Critics have responded to the floating of his name for beatification by wrongly charging the man with supporting violence, communism, and heresy.

Those who would make the archbishop a radical hero have offered their own version of these claims in approving tones.

Both are wrong.

Murals and t-shirts showing Romero alongside Salvador Allende and Che Guevara are common in Central America, yet his visage sits somewhat uncomfortably beside theirs.

Romero did not hesitate to condemn capitalism, but at the same time he was an anti-communist. In his sermons he cautioned against the dangers of atheistic, materialist Marxism.

In one of his homilies, Romero chastised leftists for criticizing American imperialism while turning a blind eye to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

While the left has come to glorify Romero, right-wing politicians in El Salvador have accused him of inspiring leftist guerrilla violence. In reality, Romero sought a peaceful solution to El Salvador’s troubles.

In his third pastoral letter, written in 1978, Romero condemned leftist guerrilla violence as “terrorist” and “seditious.”

In the fourth letter written one year later, the archbishop of San Salvador reminded the nation that violence was justifiable only in extreme situations when all other alternatives have been exhausted, citing Catholic just war theory.

The twentieth century was a difficult one for the Latin American Church. In the 1970s and 1980s, military juntas ruled most of the region.

In Argentina, the bishops’ close ties to the dictatorship of Jorge Videla and their silence on the tortures and disappearances in the country led many Argentineans to lose their trust in the Church.

By contrast, in Nicaragua many clerics supported armed revolution against the Somoza dictatorship and supported the Marxist Sandinistas.

Even a man as saintly as Dom Helder Camara, he bishop who defended Brazil’s poor against the country’s military dictatorship, believed that Marx should do for Christianity in the twentieth century what Aristotle did for medieval Thomism.

By contrast, in a 1978 homily, Romero said: “Since Marxist materialism destroys the Church’s transcendent meaning, a Marxist church would be not only self-destructive but senseless.”

Romero avoided the blinkered anti-communism of Argentina’s bishops and defended the vulnerable against military violence, seeing the hypocrisy of rulers who claim to be Christians yet persecute the people.

At the same time, he understood the dangers of Marxism, condemning the Marxist guerrilla movement that terrorized El Salvador’s ruling class.

Ernesto Cardenal, the Trappist monk who in the 1980s was a minister in Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, wrote that before becoming a Christian, one first must become a Marxist-Leninist. Romero rejected this: His personal hero was Pope Pius XI for resisting fascism and communism at the same time.

Romero also stood apart from liberation theology, distinguishing between the liberation of communism and the liberation Christ offers.

In the 1980s, some Latin American priests inspired by Marxism wanted to deny Communion to the wealthy. Romero resisted this saying in a 1979 homily:

“We are not demagogically in favor of one social class; we are in favor of God’s reign, and we want to promote justice, love, and understanding, wherever there is a heart well disposed.”

Few know that Romero received spiritual direction from an Opus Dei priest and personally knew the future saint and Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva.

When the latter died in 1975, he wrote a letter to Paul VI asking the Pope to jumpstart his canonization process, writing:

“Monsignor Escriva . . . was able to unite in his life a continuous dialogue with Our Lord and a great humanity; one could tell he was a man of God, and his manner was full of sensitivity, kindness, and good humor.”

As recommended by Opus Dei priests, Romero wore a cilice on Fridays as a form of self-mortification until his death.

One of the firmest supporters of Romero’s beatification has been Pope Benedict XVI. Both before and after his election to the papacy he has expressed his enthusiasm for the cause, going so far as to say that he has “no doubt” that Romero will be declared blessed someday.

During his 1983 pilgrimage to El Salvador, John Paul insisted on visiting Romero’s tomb despite the pleas of Latin American bishops and the Salvadoran government.

John Paul II asked local priests to open the door of the cathedral which was locked up by the military. He immersed himself in prayer for a long time in front of Romero’s tomb.

John Paul II again demonstrated his affection for Oscar Romero by insisting “again against the wishes of many churchmen” that during the 2000 Jubilee Year celebration in Rome’s Coliseum Romero’s name be mentioned among the great martyrs of the Americas.

It is a name we are likely to hear again.