Newspaper Page Text
The Southern Cross, Page 4
Commentary
Thursday, April 27, 2000
An itchy trigger finger?
O n Holy Saturday, at about 5:00 in the morn
ing, Federal agents in combat gear invaded
the Miami home of Lazaro Gonzalez, where his
great-nephew Elian Gonzalez had been living
with relatives, and removed him at gunpoint.
Later that day, Elian was flown to Andrews Air
Force Base, near Washington, and reunited with
his father. Once a definitive judgment is received
from the courts, he will presumably return to
Cuba with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.
There was no real doubt that this complicated
case would end with Elian’s return to his father’s
custody. International law and foreign policy con
cerns tipped the scales heavily in that direction
from the first. There was, in fact, a growing impa
tience with the delaying tactics of Elian’s Miami
relatives, whose understandable detestation of
Fidel Castro and Cuba’s Communist government
seemed to blind them to all other realities and
claims.
But the raid itself was barbaric and troubling.
Agents of the Justice Department, formed into a
SWAT-like team, invaded the house with a batter
ing ram. They were armed with pepper spray and
automaic weapons, which they pointed at the
unarmed family, shouting “We’ll shoot, we’ll
shoot!”
The legal basis of this raid was extremely shaky.
Although the Immigration and Naturalization
Service had declared that Lazaro no longer had
custody of the boy, the INS had not required him
to hand over Elian. The uncle, an American citi
zen, had not violated any law, court order or even
bureaucratic requirement. The INS could have sent
the agents to knock on Mr. Gonzalez’ door. As
George F. Will has remarked, “The INS preferred
to smash the door.”
Indeed, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has
rejected the government’s attempt to deny Elian
due process of law. The court had accepted his
lawyer’s appeal, but had yet to hear the arguments
or to mle on the appeal, when the Attorney
General, Janet Reno, ordered the raid.
The Miami raid again reveals the itchy trigger
Q uestion: Recently I heard of “Opus Dei”—
some affirming [things and] some negative.
Please discuss this in your question and answer
series.
—Mill McDermott
A nswer: Opus Dei (Latin for “the work of
God”) is an organization of Catholic lay
men and women who formally dedicate them
selves to apostolic works on behalf of the
Church, while living out their vocations in the
world. Their stated mission is “to promote
among Christians of all social classes a life in the
middle of the world fully consistent with their
faith and to contribute to the evangelization of
every sphere of society. In short, it is to spread
the message that all the baptized are called to
seek holiness and to make the Gospel known.”
A Spanish priest, Blessed Josemaria Escriva,
founded Opus Dei in Madrid in 1928. Escriva’s
provocative insight, innovative for its time, was
that the Catholic laity had a highly significant role
to play in bringing the world to Christ, even in the
midst of their daily, secular situations—ah idea
Federal agents remove 6-year-old Elidn
Gonzdlez from his great-uncle's house in
Miami early April 22. The Cuban refugee
boy was later reunited with his father at
Andrews Air Force Base near Washington,
finger of the current administration, as previously
seen at Waco and in Serbia. Whenever this govern
ment finds its deadlines ignored, it seems to act
with an adolescent temper and to try to force the
issue with violence, whether the question is
firearms violations, diplomatic negotiations or a
child-custody case with international implications.
When the Branch Davidians holed up in Waco
and refused to surrender on weapons charges, the
negotiations dragged on until the Justice Depart
ment’s patience snapped. The result was a ghastly
inferno in which 87 people were incinerated. Two
years later, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred
Questions & Answers
which is not so new today, thanks to Apostolicam
Actuositatem (1965), the Second Vatican
Council’s “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.”
Escriva died in 1975 and was beatified in 1992,
but even today his presence looms large within the
organization, particularly through the legacy of his
copious writings. Escriva’s onetime personal sec
retary, Bishop Javier Echevarria, is the current
Prelate of Opus Dei.
Since 1928, Opus Dei has grown to approxi
mately 80,000 members worldwide. In that time,
it has set up many high schools, universities and
centers of lay formation, both in the U.S. and
around the world. In Rome, for example, it oper
ates the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross,
as well as the University of Navarra in Spain. Its
members are involved in a wide variety of pro
jects in fields such as education and vocational
training, medicine, and the media.
In 1982, Pope John Paul II established Opus
Dei as a “personal prelature”, a special type of
structure under canon law which allows diocesan
priests and lay people to formally affiliate with it
as something like a “floating diocese.” So, for
P. Murrough Federal Building in Oklahoma City in
revenge for Waco.
When the Serbian regime was slow to agree to
the American position in talks over Kosovar, the
State and Defense Departments basically decided
to bomb Serbia into compliance. The innocent died
with the guilty in the undeclared war that followed.
On Saturday, the Justice Department again lost
patience and rather than pursue further talks or
wait for a definitive judgment from the courts,
swept in with their equivalent of a SWAT team.
The photographs of the Justice Department com
mandos, with fingers on the triggers of then-
weapons, have alarmed the world.
Granted that the Branch Davidians were obvi
ously “whacko,” that Slobodan Milosevic’s “ethnic
cleansing” was hard to distinguish from the
</> Holocaust, and that Elian Gonzalez should have
H been handed over to his father before now, the
a)
^ means of effecting the resolution of these crises
2. have been characterized by a violent impatience
° unbecoming a great power, let alone a great repub-
lie. In Elian’s case, his forcible removal from what
z had become his home smacked more of Castro’s
u usual methods than of traditional American ones.
In the propaganda war that underlay this latest
crisis, the United States had nothing to gain by a
precipitous, impatient recourse to force of arms
against a law-abiding—if stubborn—household. It
had a great deal to lose by such an action, includ
ing its claim to be far more supportive of the fami
ly than any communist government.
As the pictures of Elian shrieking in the arms of
a federal agent as he is dragged from his home in
the pre-dawn raid on Holy Saturday, with helmeted
federal agents behind them, it was hard not to see
Christ in the panicked boy and all too easy to see
the agents as latter-day centurians, enforcing the
arbitrary decrees of a present-day procurator.
May God forbid that any further crises will be
resolved in such a violently adolescent way by this
or any American administration.
—DKC
example, within this prelature men can be
ordained as priests for Opus Dei without neces
sarily belonging to a territorial diocese, and lay
people may receive sacramental ministry from
them without recourse to a parish church.
Opus Dei has sometimes come under fire for
its controversial style of operation, which has
been variously perceived as elitist or even secre
tive—charges which have been vigorously
denied by the organization’s leaders. Still, it is
definitely part and parcel of Opus Dei's message
that being one of their members is one of the
best ways of fulfilling a vocation to be Catholic
in the world. It is up to individual Catholics to
determine whether Opus Dei's way is actually
God’s way for them.
—James B. Knapp, Jr.
James B. Knapp, Jr., is Coordinator of
Technology Services for the Diocese of
Savannah. He holds a master's degree in the
ology from the John Paul II Institute in
Washington, D.C.