Fast forward from the 16th to the 20th Century. Enter, Stage Right (Wing) Father Josemaria Escriva. Concerned that the Church was losing some of the more “passionate” (read: “sadomasochistic”) elements of the True Faith, Father Escriva gathered unto him a group of faithful proto-Fascists who delighted in wrapping barbed wire around their legs and beating themselves bloody, all in the hopes of gathering the notice of the Almighty, whom, one may assume, these Christian S/M-ers were convinced had a taste for blood. Perhaps the Spanish god had been influenced by too much time in the vicinity of ol’ blood-sacrifice-lovin’ Huitzilopochtli in New Spain. It’s past a complete reckoning, yet Father Escriva declared that such mortification of the flesh was the “work of God” and Opus Dei was born twin to the Spanish Civil War.

That de facto anti0-Semitism was slow to go, too. Father Escriva once declared “Hitler couoldn’t have been such a bad person. He couldn’t have possibly killed six million Jews. At most he killed only four million.” What’s a couple of million Jews among friends?

It’s Miracle Math Made Easy, With Father Joe! And Father Joe had a talent for miracles. That’s why Pope John Paul II made a fascist-sympathizer a modern Saint, calling him “the saint of ordinary life.” Ordinary, indeed! Ordinary fascism. “Loved be pain! Sanctified be pain! Glorified be pain!” wrote the would-be Saint Escriva. The question, of course, is always one of which pain and for whom.

Under such terms, one can imagine the declaration for Pius V: “the saint for ordinary assassination plots.”