Trump has stated that he will announce his nominee to the Supreme Court on Saturday.
BETTY CLERMONT, bettyclermont@gmail.com
Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America. She writes at The Open Tabernacle blog.
She said today: “Leonard Leo selects Trump’s judicial nominees. In addition to his role at the Federalist Society, Leo is a board member of Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center. Attorney General Bill Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone have also been board members. See recent piece from The Washington Monthly: “What Drives Leonard Leo’s Campaign to Remake the Courts?” Barr just received an award from the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast; Leo is also president of the board of that group.
“Indeed, at the top, Opus Dei ‘is an efficient machine run to achieve world power,’ investigative reporter Penny Lernoux wrote in her book People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism.
“As Lernoux’s remark indicates, there is a struggle inside Catholicism and Opus Dei and groups it founded like the innocent-sounding Catholic Information Center are not at all representative of Catholics, rather it uses the garb of faith for political power for a narrow elite. The people Leo chooses are selected for their proven adherence to right-wing ideology of power at any cost. Whomever Leo gets Trump to nominate and Mitch McConnell’s Senate is set to approve, it will lead to further decay of our national wellbeing.”
Martin A. Lee, a specialist on far-right movements has written: “Opus Dei has emerged internationally as one of the most powerful and politically committed of the Catholic lay groups. Detractors have likened the organization to a ‘saintly Mafia,’ for its members control a large number of banks and financial institutions. … In the latter stages of the Franco regime, ten out of 19 cabinet officers belonged to or were closely allied with Opus Dei.”
“Opus Dei uses the Catholic Church for its own ends which are money and power …. Its members form a transnational elite. They seek to colonize the summits of power. They work with stealth — ‘holy discretion’ — and practice ‘divine deception,’” Robert Hutchison stated in the introduction to his book, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei.
See pieces by Clermont: “Opus Dei’s Influence on the U.S. Judiciary,” “Opus Dei’s William Barr, the Trump Whisperer” and “Opus Dei’s Influence is Felt in All of Washington’s Corridors of Power.”
