Trump is William Barr’s ‘Imperfect Vessel’ in his Bid to Manifest the Kingdom of God for Opus Dei
Betty Clerment, the author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America, wrote in her Catholic watchdog blog post of March 26, 2019 (titled “William Barr is Opus Dei”) that 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,” as was also reported in the Washington Post. “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 consistently spoken in language and with talking points that 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. “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’).”
On May 09, 2019, Laura Murray-Tjan published an article titled “William Barr’s Crusade For ‘Traditional Moral Order’” (Cognoscenti Journal) that included the following insights: ‘In 1995, 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. Although Barr wrote that article during the first Clinton administration, he’s been pursuing similar goals for a lifetime. Barr remains a member of the Knights of Columbus, an organization he joined in 1984, and where he served for years as a “Supreme Board Member.” One of the Knights’ primary objectives is to reduce abortion by funding pro-life pregnancy centers. Barr also recently served on the board of directors for the Catholic Information Center, which is managed by priests from Opus Dei, a wealthy and influential conservative group. (An Opus Dei priest was once Barr’s speechwriter.) Barr’s five-year tenure on the board of directors for the Ethics and Public Policy Center — an anti-abortion think tank dedicated to framing public policy along religious lines — rounds out his profile.’
By “traditional moral order” Barr means the ultra-conservative Right-Wing Catholic playbook of supporting Republicans like the current faux-president, who will “sign whatever we put in front of him” (Mitch McConnell, 2016), including Supreme Court appointee referrals by the covert fundamentalist Christian organizations, The Heritage Society, The Atlas Society, and The Family. The judges of the highest court in the land can then be counted on to support the deregulation of any and all corporate restrictions on pollution, rampant environmental destruction-for-profit, and support of Zionism (so that we can have the Apocalypse and Armageddon with the Jews’ rebuilding of the 2nd Solomonic Temple, at which point all the Jews that don’t convert to follow Christ will all be wiped away). All this so that he may please his various ‘Masters’ — ‘God’ of course, and his handlers in Opus Dei and those radical Vatican factions also frequented by White Nationalist misogynistic anti-immigrant Fundamentalist Catholic nut-case Steve Bannon. By these means he hopes to realize the repeal of Roe vs Wade, see women’s Reproductive Rights repealed (including easy access to safe birth control options), obtain a return to “traditional, moral” control over women and women’s bodies, skip purgatory, evade Hell altogether, and be rewarded in the Afterlife in Heaven by being tapped to sit at the right hand of God the Father.
No shit. That’s the playbook. For real.
This is what Barr meant when he (when asked about the hit-job he’s performing on his own career and reputation by defending and protecting Trump’s overt criminality) said, “I am at the end of my career…Everyone dies, and I am not, you know… I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”
He meant that “immortality” comes when you die, and only when you die — when you gladly leave this ‘vale of tears’ in the best ascetic/Catholic ‘contemptus mundi’ tradition, and are given your ‘reward in Heaven’ by the so-called Grace of ‘God,’ due to having faithfully and obediently served your religious hierarchy’s male authoritarian masters and Church doctrine, most of which — if you look at it — concerns the rigorous suppression of women as ‘Daughters of Eve,’ maintaining an invasive degree of control over their bodies, and keeping them out of the priesthood until Kingdom Come. All else — America, American Constitutional Rights, the Constitution itself, Human Rights, democracy, human decency, the law (except for Church Law), his decades-long friendship with Robert Mueller — is immaterial.
Have you ever wondered why Attorney General Barr — the chief law enforcement officer of the United States — so wantonly, so flagrantly breaks the law? With such an air of uncaring, irrationally entitled, self-righteous justification?
This is why.
