Rome
More than 300,000 people surrounded the Vatican this week to celebrate the canonization of Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, the Spanish priest who founded the secretive Catholic society Opus Dei. Escrivá started the order in 1928 as a forum in which ordinary Catholics can dedicate their lives and careers to God without becoming priests or nuns. The society is controversial within the church, for its founder’s close ties to fascist dictator Franco, its secrecy, and its extreme conservatism. Many of the 80,000 or so members worldwide abstain from sex and practice self-mortification, including wearing hair shirts and spiked chains on their upper thighs that inflict hidden wounds. But Pope John Paul II, whose spokesman is a member, openly admires the society’s vigorous defense of traditional Catholicism. He canonized Escrivá just 27 years after the priest’s death—one of the shortest waiting times in Vatican history.
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