Controversial Catholic group is given care of parish church

[emad]

Times
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent



OPUS DEI, the conservative Roman Catholic organisation that counts Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, among its members, has been given its first parish in Britain since it was founded in 1928.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy- O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, is to hand over pastoral care of St Thomas More church, Swiss Cottage, to Father Gerard Sheehan, an Opus Dei priest.

Father Sheehan is one of 17 priests in Britain who work for the Opus Dei organisation. None of the others is a parish priest although Father Sheehan is local deanery secretary for the Westminster archdiocese and regularly hears confessions at Westminster Cathedral and St James’ Spanish Place.

He will take over at Easter from Father Ian Dickie, who is to be moved to another parish.

The decision by Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor to entrust the parish of 500 souls and their 1968 red-brick church to Opus Dei partly indicates that the organisation has “come of age” and is achieving mainstream respectability within the Catholic Church in Britain.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1434918,00.html

THIS church is in my neighborhood.

Cormack Murphy O'Connor has forgotten the words of former RUC Chief Constable Sir Kenneth Newman who was instrumental in closing down Opus Dei networks in North London in the 1980s following the bombing of the Regent's Park Bandstand and later the Brighton bombing of the Grand Hotel at the Tory Party conference in '84.

Local residents groups fought tooth and nail for more disclosure about the Opus Dei role at the time but Margaret Thatcher put a D Notice on the matter - a Ministry of Defence gagging order - which effectively protected many of her key financial backers from being outed in the local politics of this awful cult.