Читать книгу Blaming No One - Dan Inc. Whitman - Страница 17

I was never exactly alarmed or frightened of Opus Dei, even after reading Dan Brown’s ramblings on the subject. I read his Code thing only because friends told me I should. I’m trying to remember who told me so. Those were hours I will never get back.

Opus may be a little creepy, but probably not lethal these days. It seems good at taking care of its members. Like most sects, its verbiage will make your eyes glaze over.

The Opus people in Pamplona run the best media training program by far in Spain, at the University of Navarra. As the media official at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid in the early 1990s, I was offered up as lunch partner for the Opus Dei spokesman, the day he decided to cultivate a friendship with the U.S. government. I said, “Do I have to?” The boss said, “Well you’re the media guy, and hell if I’m going.”

Duty called. Spokesmen speaking to spokesmen seems like a tautology, but that’s the way it works. We set a date for the restaurant at the lower level of the Hotel Galgos, on the calle Claudio Coello, two blocks from the embassy. One must make sacrifices for the homeland.

People in Washington made fun of us in Madrid, for never being available at 3:00 in our afternoon for phone calls or satellite video broadcasts. Most of the contact work in Madrid was done over lunch, and lunch happens from 3:00 to 5:00 there. This is real work. You shouldn’t envy us, a person can get sleepy to the point of pain over a meal at that hour in a hot climate. Circadian rhythms push a person to siesta at that hour, which of course is the reason for that ancient custom in Iberia. Madrid’s current practice of mixing business and lunch in the late afternoon may be more a departure from custom than an extension of it. But I don’t make the rules.

So was I eager to get the Opus line that hot spring day? Not at all, but I knew there could be some value in taking up the gauntlet and trying.

I think we started with a tasty cold soup, but that’s not the point. I realized from the start that sleep and boredom would be my adversaries that day.

The Opus spokesman was a gentle man and avoided hyperboles in our almost three-hour conversation. I still don’t know what the point was of it all, but I did learn that the older an outlying sect becomes, the more soft spoken. Opus, mind you, openly seeks power, and got a big chunk of it in the Vatican when it rescued the Vatican Bank from bankruptcy and vague scandal in the 1980s. If you like these things, google the Banco Ambrosiano and Roberto Calvi, and his “acrobatic suicide” under a bridge in London in 1982.

Back to that day in Madrid. I’ve found that quoting others while distancing yourself from those quotes is a failsafe tool of publicists. “People say that Opus was friendly with the Franco regime,” I said as I poured my partner’s wine.

Taking no offense, the Opus man acknowledged those rumors, noted that a foreigner can be forgiven for picking up inaccuracies, then eagerly spent an hour and a quarter refuting them. Opus had suffered more than others under Franco, he insisted. And I hope he got rewards back home for driving the point. I remember my own inner processing of the new information: “I am blessed, I need only catch a few things he’s saying, and remember to stay awake. The Angel of Death has spared me once again.”

At the same time, I knew I’d need another couple of questions at hand for when the monologue ran out. Incredibly fortunately, I needed only one other: I asked why religions proselytize, since I’ve never understand why they do so. I still don’t, really. If you have a solidly held belief, would it not dilute, rather than strengthen it, to seek to draw in others? I’m not being perverse here, at worst, naïve. Home run. The Opus man loved the question, and spent another 75 minutes answering it. The argument went something like this: when I embrace a belief, I am comforted by having others around me who share it. Fair enough.

Thus I not only survived the experience, but really did learn something of value. Now, twenty years later, I share with you my coping mechanism and the relief I sense even to this day, in summoning the stamina and courage to stay conscious that whole afternoon. Fact check: of Franco’s 116 cabinet ministers in 1936-75, eight were Opus Dei prelates. Whether they were under his thumb or benefiting from the relationship, I will not seek to judge. Pope John Paul II beatified Opus founder Jose Maria Escriva in 1992, and canonized him in 2002. Escriva was politically neutral in public, but did say to a colleague, “Hitler against the Jews, Hitler against the Slavs, this means Hitler against communism.” You have to judge people in the context of their times.

Most importantly, if you are fighting sleep but have to order wine, sip slowly and go with the white.