Opus Dei US Wrote BuzzFlash That We Incorrectly Called Bill Barr a Member of Opus Dei, But We Never Said That He Was -- and That's What's Interesting
August 13, 2020
Attorney General William Barr being sworn in (Wikipedia)
BUZZFLASH UPDATE ON AUGUST 13, 2020
On August 2, 2019, BuzzFlash posted an article by long-time BuzzFlash commentary writer Bill Berkowitz. It was entitled, William Barr and Opus Dei, the Secretive Ultra-Conservative Catholic Organization That Poses an Existential Threat to Democracy and Pluralism. On October 14, 2019, Laurence Tribe retweeted Berkowitz’s commentary and it received thousands of hits. Tribe’s tweet on the piece raised an alarm:
I’m usually repelled by conspiracy theories and resist assigning guilt by association, but there’s some pretty alarming shit going down here that merits everyone’s attention
About six months ago, a comment by Brian Finnerty, listed as the communications contact on the Opus Dei US website appeared to “correct” the commentary by declaring that Bill Barr was not a member of Opus Dei, although Berkowitz never declared that he was. Finnerty wrote to BuzzFlash:
I work in the communications office of Opus Dei. There are plenty of misstatements of fact in the article, but here are two: 1) William Barr is not a member of Opus Dei. 2) Likewise, the majority of the board of directors of the Catholic Information Center are not members of Opus Dei.
Please, whether you agree or disagree with the AG, the issues facing this nation deserve a higher level of discourse than "Barr is evil because he is in Opus Dei." I realize the purpose of your site is to advocate for a particular perspective, but please be more careful with misstatements of fact.
Berkowitz wrote, as you can see below in the original commentary, quoting another source, that members of the DC Catholic Information Center Board were thought to be members of Opus Dei, but there was no way of proving it. Also, we know of no misstatements of facts in the article.
Although BuzzFlash cannot possibly prove that Bill Barr himself asked Opus Dei US to openly state that he was not a member of the Vatican Prelature, Finnerty referred BuzzFlash to an Opus Dei US news release, apparently one of a kind, stating that Bill Barr was not a member of the secretive group:
Our normal policy is not to identify members (or non-members) of the Prelature, but rather to leave it to each individual to make known this information. Nevertheless, because there have been recent news accounts referring to the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, as a member of Opus Dei, we would like to clarify that Mr. Barr is not a member of Opus Dei nor has he ever been one.
Finnerty’s reference to a quotation not in Berkowitz’s commentary, "Barr is evil because he is in Opus Dei," is ironic because the only mention of evil in the commentary is by Barr who stated that “steady erosion of the Judeo-Christian moral system” in the judiciary was causing fewer Americans to view abortion as “evil.”
The thesis of Berkowitz’s article from August of last year was that Barr embodies the authoritarian religiously-sanctioned outlook that the end justifies the means, so it is permissible, for instance, to be duplicitous or misleading in Congressional testimony for example.
A lengthy July 23 article in the National Catholic Reporter on Barr states:
Barr's critics counter that a Catholic at the highest level of government uses his influence to endorse a selective, ideologically driven understanding of religious liberty, and champions a nearly limitless view of executive power that is particularly dangerous, given Trump's disregard for bedrock democratic norms.
Of the myriad forces that have shaped Barr's views on politics, law and religion, a constant has been his connections to a tight-knit Catholic culture where fraternal organizations, think tanks and conservative clergy understand faith as a bulwark against perceived attacks on traditional morality, the family and church. While the attorney general doesn't name-drop theologians or directly cite the influence of Catholic doctrine, he draws both from longstanding Christian principles, and the grievance politics of the Christian right.
Barr’s view of the US is one of nation, religion and family as the glue holding society together under authoritarian leadership.
The National Catholic Reporter calls Barr a “Culture Warrior Catholic.” It confirms Berkowitz’s commentary and expands upon it, when it brings up a Barr-Federalist Society connection through fellow Catholic Information Center board member alumnus, Leonard Leo, who has been the go-to man for assembling the list of right-wing judges from which Trump nominated and Mitch McConnell has confirmed more than 200 federal bench appointees:
While Barr is not a member of Opus Dei, according to his Senate questionnaire, from 2014 to 2017 he served on the board of the Catholic Information Center, an Opus Dei-affiliated bookstore and chapel a few blocks from the White House that is a longtime hub for conservative intellectuals, Republican politicians and other well-connected Catholics in the nation's capital.
Other prominent board members at the center have included Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society, which helped shepherd the Supreme Court nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch through the Senate confirmation process. White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who led Trump's defense during the Senate impeachment trial, also previously served on the Catholic Information Center's board. Cipollone was a speechwriter for Barr during the first Bush administration.
What spurred this BuzzFlash update was a disturbing interview that Barr gave with Fox News fringe host Mark Levin this past weekend. Barr raised the alarm of secular culture:
"They view their political opponents as evil because we stand in the way of their progressive utopia that they're trying to reach, and that's what gives the intensity to the partisan feelings that people feel today, because for them, this pilgrimage we're all on is a political pilgrimage. Everything is reduced to politics for people who don't have that perspective."
Wouldn’t that be the Trump cult, including Barr?
He also defamed Black Lives Matter, calling it a “Bolshevik organization” with “fascistic” tactics.
And he went on to tell Levin:
Barr theorized that the left "really represents a Rousseauian Revolutionary Party that believes in tearing down the system, that what's wrong about America today all has to do with the institutions we have and we have to tear them down."
Uh, wouldn’t that be his mob boss, Donald J. Trump, for whom Barr serves as consigliere?
The following is the original article that has caused such a dust-up from August 2, 2019.
William Barr and Opus Dei, the Secretive Ultra-Conservative Catholic Organization That Poses an Existential Threat to Democracy and Pluralism
By Bill Berkowitz
It is no secret that Attorney General William P. Barr has ties to Opus Dei, the highly secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic organization. Opus Dei, which literally means "The Work of God," “is known for recruiting very influential members, especially those simpatico with culturally conservative causes,” veteran journalist Frank Cocozzelli recently explained. Barr’s connections to Opus Dei – it is unclear how deep it runs -- might in part explain, as Cocozzelli pointed out in an early May story headlined “Did Opus Dei Teach A.G. Barr to ‘Puts Away His Scruples’?,” Barr’s “apparent ‘ends justifies the means’ strategy” regarding his testimony about the Mueller Report before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Before his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in January, Barr had completed a questionnaire,” Betty Clermont reported. “On page 4, he listed positions he’s held as director of the Catholic Information Center [which is managed by priests from Opus Dei], (2014-2017), director of the [decidedly right wing think tank] Ethics and Public Policy Center (2004-2009) and director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (1994-2015).
In her blog, The Open Tabernacle, Clerment, the author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America, wrote: “the Opus Dei Catholic Information Center’s ‘members and leaders continue to have an outsize impact on policy and politics. It is the conservative spiritual and intellectual center … and its influence is felt in all of Washington’s corridors of power,’ the Washington Post stated recently.”
“As Cozocelli points out,” researcher D. Cary Hart told me in an email, ”Barr was on the board of Catholic Information Center. The priests who manage CIC are all Opus Dei members and it is generally believed that membership is required of the board of directors. [However] [y]ou will never be able to prove it, [since] Supernumeraries and Cooperators keep their identities secret.”
“The Attorney General has in the past spoken with language that is in line with the goals of both Opus Dei’s and the EPPC’s [the Ethics and Public Policy Center where Barr was director from 2004-2009] overlapping agendas,” Cocozzelli suggested. “This past December Americans United’s Rob Boston reminded us of Barr’s past theological screeds. These run the gamut from condemning public schools (they had undergone a ‘moral lobotomy’); in a 1992 address to Bill Donohue’s Catholic League, he called for the imposition of ‘God’s law’ in America. In that same address he went after contemporary supporters of the separation of church and state (‘The secularists of today are clearly fanatics’).”
“In 1995,” Laura Murray-Tjan wrote in late May, “Barr wrote that he was troubled by the ‘steady erosion of the Judeo-Christian moral system’ in the United States, and argued that law should aid in the restoration of the ‘traditional moral order.’ Roe v. Wade has contributed to the nation’s ‘permissiveness,’ Barr argues, by causing fewer people to view abortion as ‘evil.’ In short, the ‘character of the judiciary’ is crucially important because, Barr believes, our morals track what judges say is legal.”
The Rev. C. John McCloskey, who was a member of Opus Dei, became director of the Catholic Information Center in 1998. He helped drive CIC from a little known organization to becoming a major player in DC politics; he was described as “Catholic Church’s K Street lobbyist.” After a few years of growing his and CIC’s profile, he suddenly disappeared. In early January of this year, it was disclosed that McCloskey had victimized “a woman who had gone to him in 2002 for spiritual guidance,” The Washington Post’s Joe Heim reported.
“The global Opus Dei community confirmed … that it ordered McCloskey to leave Washington in 2003 and said his priestly duties were restricted. Subsequent reports have raised questions about whether his duties were restricted and in which ways. He was later sent to Chicago and California. Opus Dei paid the woman a $977,000 sexual misconduct settlement in 2005,” Heim pointed out.
The priest Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, who believed “that lay Catholics could achieve holiness without entering a religious order”, founded opus Dei in Spain in 1928. According to Cocozzelli, among other things, “Escriva also taught his followers to put away their scruples (The Way, Nos. 258 and 259), seemingly teaching that the ends always justify the means. Perhaps maxims 258 and 259 might explain the Attorney General’s prior misleading House testimony as well his unwillingness to answer questions that merely required a yes or no response. Much of what Escriva preached dovetails nicely with the William Barr’s ideal of a society built upon religious orthodoxy. That being the case, it also seems that Escriva’s means for realizing that goal similarly dovetails.”
“Opus Dei has historically worked to purge progressives from church ranks, notably in Latin America, and infuse Catholicism with right-wing principles,” Cocozzelli pointed out in a 2009 story posted at Political Research Associates titled The Politics of Schism in the Catholic Church. “John Paul saw Opus Dei and other authoritarian-minded groups such as the Legionnaires of Christ and Communion y Liberacíon as a means to a more conservative Church.”
In a 2006 article posted at Talk to Action titled “The Catholic Right, Part Two: An Introduction To The Role Of Opus Dei” Cocozzelli noted that “The danger that a politically active Opus Dei membership currently represents to liberal democracy is not from assassinations by imaginary albino monks (for the record, there are no Opus Dei monks), but in its very plutocratic attitude in abhorring dissent.”
Cocozzelli ended his Daily Kos story writing: “What is it about Republicans such as William Barr who are willing to destroy the norms of both justice and American democracy; what drives men such as him? To this observer, it seems it is the overwhelming desire to impose both a theocratic cultural agenda coupled with a laissez-faire-tinged brand of capitalism rapidly devolving into a new feudalism.”
You can view Brian Finnerty’s original comment to BuzzFlash and other comments by going to the original commentary and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.
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