The Inventor. W. E. Gutman

journalist and best-selling author, has described it as

      “a devious, antidemocratic, reactionary, semi-fascist institution, desperately famished for absolute dominion in the Church and quite possibly very close now to having that power.”

      Calling the elite group, “authoritarian and power-mad,” Greeley warns that

      “Opus Dei is an extremely dangerous organization because it appeals to the love of secrecy and the power lust of certain kinds of religious personalities. It may well be the most powerful group in the Church today. It is capable of doing an enormous amount of harm. It ought to be forced out of the shadows or suppressed.”

      Opus Dei has about one million members worldwide. At least 2,000 are ordained priests. With this international cohort of dedicated warriors, Opus Dei has successfully penetrated schools and universities, banks, publishing firms, television and radio stations, ad agencies and film companies. It has been accused of deceptive and aggressive recruitment practices, including “love bombing” -- the deliberate and syrupy show of affection by an individual or group as a tool of conscription or conversion -- and instructing celibate members to form friendships, attend social gatherings and submit written reports on potential converts.

      The core precept of Opus Dei is “to help shape the world in a Catholic manner.” Helpers include clergy, captains of industry, high-ranking military officers and government officials. The group “comes surrounded by a political miasma,” the British daily, The Guardian, noted recently. The super-stealthy organization was founded just before the Spanish Civil War and blossomed in the halcyon Catholic days of El Caudillo, fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s “crusade” against the Republican left. When Opus Dei came to prominence in the late 1960s it was because Franco’s cabinet included an inordinate number of Opusdeistas -- too many to be the result of coincidence.

      For Father Hubert, whose passion for Christ calls for no less than the repeal of Laïcité -- the scrupulously enforced separation of Church and State in France -- membership in Opus Dei arms him with special and far-reaching powers. But the organization’s militancy, in his opinion, does not quite match his own God-driven longing to cleanse the world of heretics and deliver sinful, rudderless humanity, by force if necessary, into Christ’s loving arms. He seeks and is granted entry into the Knights of Malta, a closed fraternity of the Roman Catholic Church whose upper tier members are fastidiously aristocratic. De Ravaillac, an extremist whose family tree goes back at least 400 years and which includes a reviled regicide, meets or exceeds the Knights’ rigorous standards for admission. They consider him quite a “prize catch.”

      The 900-year-old organization was formerly known as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of the Saints John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. Modeled after an ancient group of soldier-monks who massacred “infidels,” (Muslims, Jews and Cathars) Knights of Malta, ceremonies and rituals “inculcate lessons of chivalry and courage, and inspire a militant spirit in opposition to all non-Christian ideologies and powers.” With over 10,000 members in 42 countries, the Knights are influential Vatican surrogates with extensive ties to right-wing intelligence networks.

      Originally programmed to be ruthless tactical fighters, later adopting a fiercely anti-communist stance, the Knights were instrumental in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also took part in U.S. global “black” (covert) operations. The founding fathers of the CIA, William “Wild Bill” Donovan and Allen Dulles, the longest-serving CIA director, were Knights, as were many in the CIA hierarchy, including JFK’s director, John McCone and Ronald Reagan’s director, William Casey. McCone helped engineer the 1973 military coup against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. According to journalist Carl Bernstein, Casey gave Pope John Paul II unparalleled access to CIA intelligence, including data on spy satellites and field operatives.

      There is compelling evidence that the Knights of Malta were linked to the “Rat Run,” the post-World War II getaway route used by Nazi top brass and death camp “scientists” from defeated Germany to the Americas. These thugs were issued new identities and special credentials that ensured escape from prosecution for crimes against humanity. One of them, Major General Reinhard Gehlen, a devout Catholic and legendary Cold War spymaster, surrendered to the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1945. Because of his experience and useful contacts in the Soviet Union, he was freed, as were seven of his senior officers, in exchange for their pledge to gather intelligence for the United States. Flown to Washington, Gehlen went to work for Donovan and Dulles, then the Office of Strategic Services station chief in Switzerland. Gehlen handed over the names of several OSS officers who were members of the U.S. Communist Party.

      A year later, Gehlen was flown back to Germany where he resumed his spy work, this time as a lackey of the U.S. He set up a dummy organization composed of 350 former German intelligence officers. That number eventually grew to 4,000. For many years, the “V-men,” (V-mann or Vertrauensmann -- trusted man) as they were known, were the eyes and ears of the CIA in Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Recruited among men who had as little culture, common sense, objectivity or logic as possible, they were used primarily to maintain surveillance of civilian populations in Germany and occupied countries.

      Overall, the Gehlen organization’s performance was at best disappointing. One rare successful mission infiltrated some 5,000 anti-communists of Eastern European origin into the Soviet Union and its satellites. These agents were trained at a facility named Oberammergau, site of the yearly staging of one of Hitler’s favorite diversions, the unambiguously anti-Semitic Passion Plays. The organization was severely compromised when it was infiltrated by communist moles -- as were the CIA and the British MI6. One of the double-agents was the illustrious Harold “Kim” Philby, spy-extraordinaire who served the communist cause until his death in Moscow in 1988.

      Gehlen employed hundreds of “ex-Nazis,” among them Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand-man and commander of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. Brunner was responsible for the slaughter of 140,000 Jews. His death has never been confirmed; he was believed to be still alive in 2007. The CIA turned a blind eye and, owing the exigencies of the Cold War, even took part in some of Gehlen’s operations.

      Robert Wolfe, historian at the U.S. National Archives wrote that

      “U.S. Army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen’s offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red Army -- and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired.”

      In appreciation for his work, Gehlen, Hitler’s Eastern Front intelligence chief who organized and took part in atrocities against Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, was awarded the Knights of Malta’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of Merit. [In 1988, the American branch of the Knights of Malta pinned the Grand Cross on Ronald Reagan “for devotion to Christian principles.”] People in Central America still remember Reagan as the man who funneled millions of tax dollars to repressive and often brutal regimes whose U.S.-trained death squads murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

      One of the Knights of Malta’s main spheres of influence is Latin America, where fascists and escaped Nazis were given a warm welcome. The late Chilean strongman, General Augusto Pinochet, a CIA-stooge and convicted human rights violator, was a Knight. So is deposed Peruvian dictator, human rights violator and embezzler, Alberto Fujimori, America’s “man in Lima” until his arrest in 2005. So was the late Argentinean president Juan Peron who, recently declassified CIA documents suggest, laundered Nazi gold through the Vatican Bank subsidiary, Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982. The Vatican Bank is widely believed to have channeled covert U.S. funds to Poland’s Solidarity trade union and transferred laundered money from the illegal sale of arms to Iran to the Contras through Banco Ambrosiano.

      The scandal, “characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy,” would prompt Congress to conclude that “a cabal of zealots” (members of Reagan’s cabinet, later the Bush-1 administration) violated the Hughes-Ryan Act and the Boland Amendment by failing to inform congressional intelligence committees about its covert actions in the Middle East and Central America. There are those who wonder