Popes and Phantoms

Opus Dei plays a role as well. But not the Vatican curia. The men closest to the pope especially have sunk deeper into confusion. It is a film that has become the matter of international intrigue even before arriving in the theaters.

Dziwisz and Navarro had the idea of bringing pope Karol Wojtyla right into the middle of the quarrel. And when they sketched out a retreat, they created a disaster. They denied, both of them, that the pope had ever made the comment that the whole world heard from these very two.

And the following Monday, December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dziwisz received the four who provided the preview to the pope. Both Michelinis are supernumeraries of Opus Dei. Since that time they have been very close, receiving many heavenly signs. During production, Jan Michelini was struck by lightning while was filming the crucifixion, and he was struck again on December 5, the day the pope previewed the film.

On both occasions, he came away unharmed. The conversation took place in Italian. The key phrase is the following: A few days went by and, on the 16th, in the United States, "Variety" came out with the scoop: On the 17th, two important newspapers increased the coverage. By mid-December, half of the Roman curia had seen the film and been enraptured by it. It went through six printings in a matter of months and touched off heated controversy. It lived on — some would say, lives on still — in the United States.

Much of it, in fact, is pertinent to conditions in American Catholicism today. Here, one might say, is a Victorian anticipation of the crisis that has afflicted religious life in the United States over the last half century.

These men were builders and doers, not theorists, and they wanted to be loyal to the Church and to the Pope. Better than Leo XIII or anyone else could have known at the time, the opinions condemned in the papal letter have turned out to be widely held among American Catholics today. That is the case with the notion that each individual member of the Church can decide religious questions for himself or herself and that this remarkable ability comes directly to each one from the Holy Spirit.

Infighting intensified in the next several years. All this and more was the Americanism condemned by the Pope.

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