They practice penance and undergo deprivation, fasting, cold showers, moderate cilician and from time to time to sleep on the ground. Other Western and Asian mysticisms of today and always, martial arts fighter ballerinas and highly competitive athletes, practice stoic training. This is perceived as normal and no one would bother the opus if they were free from a stigma: being conservatives, true unforgivable and irredeemable fault for some factors of our culture and communication. They are not a religious order, as some believe, but a lay and, above all, voluntary order from which people join and also withdraw freely, from various professions, politicians, managers, technicians, businessmen, and they are expected to be successful in them. But their conservative asceticism makes them unreliable for certain environments, although the supernumeraries they are married, with families and their life is conventional. Prominent members of the work they have held and still hold the most varied positions in various parts of the world (De Gaulle, Adolfo Suárez) but clouds of suspicion surround them.
The opposite occurs with Liberation Theology. During the pontificate of Paul VI, the CELAM (Latin American Episcopal Council) organized a meeting in Barranquilla, Colombia (1968) to discuss the problems of the Latin American Church. The “new” revolutionary conception that runs through the region is strongly felt, with the “preferential option for the poor”, represented by the priests Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Pedro Casaldáliga, Frei Beto, Ernesto Cardenal and many others. The archetypes of the “option” are Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and for the moment its most sublime expression, the guerrilla priest Camilo Torres, who was killed in combat in 1966. Torres was part of the ELN, a guerrilla that had sentenced death to “ capitalism and the oligarchy”, and that, with the FARC, liberation theologians saw as necessary instruments of struggle, just like other experiences today also shipwrecked, Allende, Velasco, Torres, MNR, Tupamaros, Sandinistas, Farabundo Martí.
Frei Betto interviews Castro in an extremely obsequious book called Fidel and religion. Thirty years later, the author recalls: “I was happy, willing to never again wash my hand that had greeted Fidel. It was a dream to meet the guerrilla from the Sierra Maestra… we stayed there until 6am”. Another of the rocks star that still illuminates, Leonardo Boff, author of Memoirs of a liberation theorist, does not believe in the resurrection (peculiar in a Franciscan priest) and understands that “the resurrection is a rebellion against the world”. But revolutionary diseases are hard to cure. Interrogated in the face of the crushing fact that a revolutionary utopia led to totalitarianism and the universal communist debacle, he tenses his argument: “be careful with sharp judgments. The eighty years of socialism have not been in vain nor do they represent a global disaster… it brought us progressive institutions for the immense marginalized majorities”.
They will never apologize for blessing one of the cruelest known dictatorships that dragged Cuba into the 19th century, nor for supporting guerrillas, nor for leading Christians, laity and priests to death (although he traveled the island to receive revolutionary attention). Proximity to Castroism is a virtue, but the Spanish Church, including Opus Dei, if they blame their relationship with Franco, who was a disgrace, without forgetting that the Spanish Republic was a revolutionary dictatorship that executed Catholic prelates en masse, to Trotskyism (and 600 thousand Spaniards). According to historical sources, in Lérida they assassinated 66% of the curia, in Madrid 30%, in Barcelona 22%, in Barbastro 88%. In Tortosa, 62%, Malaga 48%, Menorca 49%, Segorbe 55%, Toledo 42% and Valencia 27% for a total of 7,835 religious, and between churches, abbeys and monasteries they calculate nearly six thousand buildings destroyed. I distrust revolutionary ideologues (those who went over to the right also did so to commit rubieras) than calm conservatives.