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...controversial almost from birth. Opus threatened the era's Catholic clericalism, which privileged priests, monks and nuns over the laity, and Escrivá was called a heretic. In the 1950s, several prominent Opus Dei members joined Franco's dictatorial but church-supportive regime in Spain, inaugurating speculation about the group's political leanings. The church's Second Vatican Council (1962-65) seemed to catch up with Escrivá's idea of lay activism--but his rigid adherence to Catholic teaching put his system at odds with liberals who accorded the laity a wide freedom of conscience. He himself was a polarizing figure...
Opus Dei is not a kind of spiritual pick-me-up for casual Catholics. It features a small, committed membership (85,500 worldwide and a mere 3,000 in the U.S.), many of whom come from pious families and are prepared to embrace unpopular church teachings such as its birth-control ban. Members take part in a rigorous course of spiritual "formation" stressing church doctrine and contemplation plus Escrivá's philosophy of work and personal holiness. Opus' core is its "numeraries," the 20% who, despite remaining lay, pledge celibacy, live together in one of about 1,700 sex-segregated "centers...
...home, the U.S. flexed its great muscles, put everyone to work, paid them more money, built them more and better houses, more and fancier cars (see BUSINESS IN 1952). Its enterprising suburb builders raised up almost overnight a new Levittown beside the Delaware River, bigger at birth than the pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania cities of York and Lancaster. Its patient medical researchers found drugs that gave promise of conquering TB and polio. Its impatient newspaper readers doused themselves inside & out with another wonder drug, chlorophyll, and followed the Wars of the Roses-Eleanor and Billy...
...were swayed by her poise and beauty, but her hold on women was stronger still. For all her modernity, Diana was a living embodiment of an atavistic, patriarchal fact of life. Women marry up. Little boys don't dream of becoming princes, because they either are such by birth or are not. But little girls are still taught to dream that someday their prince will come and take them away to the castle. Grown women, no matter how bruised by reality, remember those romantic dreams...
...Chalk one up for the enduring enigma of royalty. Long ago, mystery added to the authority of Kings; now, the idea of monarchy is self-evidently nonsensical. How can one person picked by the lottery of birth possibly embody a whole nation? What can a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth II, prohibited from exercising any real power, actually do to justify her country's steady devotion - the crowds who line up to cheer when she passes, her face on each coin and bill and postage stamp, a national anthem that beseeches God to save her? What does she really...