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Serpents and Doves

Opus Dei may be in for a shock at the Last Judgment Underground church in Villa Tevere, the headquarters of Opus Dei in Rome. | BBC World Service/The Baffler

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Churchby Gareth Gore. Simon & Schuster, 448 pages. 2024.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, said the first-century BC Roman poet Lucretius. “Only religion can move men to such wickedness.” He didn’t know a tenth of it. From the biblical slaughter of the Amalekites to pagans persecuting Christians before the Emperor Constantine was baptized to Christians persecuting pagans (and other Christians) afterward to the Crusades to the post-Reformation wars and inquisitions to the Spaniards’ evangelization of the New World and countless other dark passages in history, it is astonishing how eager believers have been to maim or murder one another for the greater glory of God.

In light of all that mayhem, perhaps one shouldn’t be too horrified when a religious organization is guilty of nothing worse than vast financial sleight-of-hand, assiduously courting the rich and powerful, and economically exploiting thousands of young female members, all the while skillfully projecting a flattering and self-serving image of itself to potential members and donors. Opus Dei, the organization in question, has not, after all, beheaded anyone or burned anyone at the stake.

The story of Opus Dei, the controversial lay Catholic society, has often been told, but never so thoroughly, at least in English. Opus, written by the financial journalist Gareth Gore, is a solidly researched work and will undoubtedly survive the public-relations, and even legal, blitz that Opus Dei will surely mount against it. (Though the author sometimes leans a little heavily on the rhetoric: “fueling deep divisions [and] ripping our society apart”; “as the rest of the world shrunk in horror . . .” A slightly more restrained tone would have communicated his indignation just as effectively.) Gore is a longtime reporter and editor for the London-based International Financing Review, a journal covering global capital markets. He had spent nearly a decade reporting on bank closures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when Banco Popular, one of Spain’s largest banks, closed in 2017. At first Gore, like the rest of the international financial press corps, saw nothing out of the ordinary about Popular’s closing, and moved on. Then he noticed that while other shareholders were clamoring for restitution, the largest shareholder, an anonymous entity called The Syndicate, was quietly moving to dissolve itself and disappear. His curiosity was piqued.

The Syndicate was a “nest of Russian dolls”: dozens of companies and foundations with innocuous-sounding names and overlapping directors. All their funds came from the Syndicate, and the Syndicate earned considerable dividends from its Banco Popular shares. The money it disbursed to its subsidiaries—and to hundreds of “support companies” throughout the world—was spent on schools, residences, retreat centers, and other projects of a single organization: Opus Dei, the “Work of God,” a Catholic society founded in 1928 in Spain with the intention of “sanctifying” the secular world.

Opus Dei had controlled the board of Banco Popular for around twenty years. All the services a bank can perform for a valued client were made available to it: currency movements, shell companies, letters of credit, secret bank accounts in Panama, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. The bank set up a charitable foundation to which it dedicated 5 percent of its profits annually, eventually amounting to $150 million in today’s money. Shareholders were told by the bank’s chairman, a member of Opus Dei, that the money was going to “good causes.” Most of the money went to one or another Opus Dei project.

Sometimes red lines were crossed. A sub rosa takeover of a private Swiss bank called Imefbank was followed, throughout the sixties, by large-scale efforts to circumvent Spain’s currency controls. Many millions of dollars wound up in Opus Dei’s accounts (i.e., its shell companies’ accounts) in the course of the huge Matesa manufacturing scandal of 1969, which Gore says was covered up by an Opus Dei member in Franco’s cabinet. A tax-evading businessman and Opus Dei member with a large holding company gave the organization $200 million over the years. This steady stream of unsanctified cash—along with 100 percent of its celibate members’ earnings and around 10 percent of its married members’ earnings, along with the donations they have incessantly drummed up from benefactors—have gone to finance the organization’s ceaseless expansion. It now operates 275 elementary and high schools, 228 university residencies, 160 technical and hospitality schools, 19 universities, 12 business schools, and many retreat facilities and conference centers in six continents and 66 countries. In recent years it has funded several conservative academic programs and institutes, like the Witherspoon Institute and the James Madison Program, both in Princeton, New Jersey. Its net worth was estimated at $2.8 billion in 2005.

Gore’s expert use of tax filings and stock transfers is what one would expect from a veteran financial journalist. How he got so many highly placed Opus Dei members on so many continents to speak with him on the record is more surprising. It is a pity he never got to speak with the founder of Opus Dei, Saint Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, who died in 1975. The saint reportedly had an explosive temper and hated to be contradicted. The confrontation would have been epic. One obvious question would be: How did he reconcile his professedly complete and total trust in God and the power of prayer with his continual browbeating of his “sons” and “daughters” for more money and more recruits? Gore quotes one of his letters: “We must make our Father-God dizzy with our pleading.” This is an unflattering conception of God. Was He likely to forget their need? Did He want to be cajoled, like King Lear? Jesus said: “And when you pray, do not keep babbling like the pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” (Matthew 6:7-8.) Did this not apply to Opus Dei?

Opus Dei does not endorse candidates for political office. Their interventions are limited to spiritual direction, conferring awards, generating publicity, fundraising, and networking. It does not take positions, but it lobbies very hard to place members in policy-making positions, especially in the Vatican. Here in the United States, the head of the Conference of Catholic Bishops is a member of Opus Dei, and this has predictably meant a shift in antiabortion militancy and a decline in concern about poverty. For all their studied public neutrality, there is no doubt where their sympathies lie, and I’m not sure Jesus would approve.

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty-five, Jesus imagines addressing his disciples at the Last Judgment, separating those who have fed the hungry, tended the sick, and otherwise served the poor and powerless from those who have not. He sends the former to heaven and the latter to hell. If this is indeed the real Jesus, then Opus Dei may be in for a shock at the Last Judgment. The only public issues the organization cares about are abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and stem cell research, none of which Jesus said a word about. That its political allies are enemies of democracy and friends of plutocracy bothers the organization’s members not at all. One of their closest collaborators is Leonard Leo, former vice president of the Federalist Society, who dreamed up the idea of stealing a Supreme Court seat from the Democrats and sold it to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who thereupon refused to schedule a vote on Obama’s nominee for ten months until the nomination lapsed at the end of the congressional session and Trump took office. (McConnell later rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett eight days before Biden’s election.) Antonin Scalia, also close to Opus Dei, helped concoct a flimsy pretext for awarding George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and all but gloated about it afterward. Clarence Thomas, another friend of the society, is possibly the most corrupt Supreme Court Justice in history, having lied in his confirmation hearings about harassing a female employee and, more recently, having accepted millions of dollars in gifts from a right-wing billionaire without reporting them. Former Attorney General William Barr, once a member of the board of Opus Dei’s flagship Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., was a purveyor of misinformation: according to a federal judge, Barr made “misleading statements” in a “calculated attempt” to misrepresent the Mueller Report in order to cover his boss’s (i.e., President Trump’s) ass. Why Opus Dei could not refrain from sucking up to wealthy and powerful people with abysmal political morals is something I imagine Jesus will want to know on that Last Day. He may let them off because of all the Masses they’ve attended, all the Rosaries they’ve prayed. But I don’t think they’ll have much to show for themselves in the way of good works. All those universities, business schools, high schools, and so on are primarily recruiting schemes. The love of thought or beauty for their own sake is not, as far as I can tell, any part of their motivation.

Opus Dei is hypersensitive to bad publicity. With one exception (which Gore covers at length), it has avoided major sex scandals. But it has taken three hits in recent years: the financial scandals mentioned above; recruiting underage (i.e., fourteen- or fifteen-year old) adolescents, which many parents understandably view as too young to sign up for a lifetime of sacrifice; and several lawsuits by the Work’s “numerary assistants.” These are generally young, poor, and uneducated women in underdeveloped countries who are recruited to serve God by maintaining the houses and buildings of Opus Dei. They are trained in domestic arts, given housing and spiritual direction, and in return work up to twelve hours a day cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and other chores. They are not paid, and they have no retirement accounts or labor contracts. They take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, so even if they had any money and could speak the language of the country they’re working in (they often can’t), it would be a hard life. Those who try to leave and ask for help with the transition are told that they have not actually been working for Opus Dei but for one of the countless anonymous entities set up to own its individual buildings, which has no further responsibility for them. Lately some of the women have been fighting in court and in the media for restitution. Opus Dei has been resisting. If the judges in these cases could see some of the breathtakingly expensive furnishings at the organization’s headquarters in Rome, they might be moved.

The Opus Dei of Gore’s portrait puts one in mind of a Leninist revolutionary party: hierarchical, centralized, secretive, calculating, tightly coordinated, demanding total commitment of its members, willing to dispense with ordinary human affection, candor, and compassion in order to achieve the institution’s goals. That may sound overstated, but it’s not. As an undergraduate, I was a numerary (i.e., celibate) member of Opus Dei for four and a half years: always on the ground floor, so never in a position to observe financial shenanigans or labor-code violations. But Gore’s account rings true to me. The pressure to recruit new members was unremitting. The esprit de corps, the sense of being an elite among the elite, was intoxicating. Disobedience was unthinkable. Relationships were entirely instrumental. Spontaneous affection played no part—I gave up my two best friends in college because they were not potential recruits. We still had to consult the Index of Forbidden Books: I dropped two courses because they weren’t “safe.” Today the policy on reading books, especially books of philosophy, social theory and criticism, or intellectual history, is even more restrictive. (The self-flagellation was not, however, a big deal.)

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What is perhaps hardest to understand from outside the walls is the self-deception. We really believed the transparent falsehoods we continually parroted: falsehoods (or half-truths) about Opus Dei’s strict political neutrality and its entire political independence from the Franco regime, about how every member is as free as any other Christian, about how their front organizations are completely autonomous and not controlled by the Prelature in any way, about how Opus Dei bears no resemblance to a religious order and only malice could lead anyone to suggest that it does. Opus Dei: An Open Bookis the title of a propaganda tract by a member, as well as the message its spokesmen continually convey. Given how impenetrable is the secrecy enshrouding the organization, and how endless and intricate their conniving, one can only admire their chutzpah.

I wish I could claim to have left in a fit of indignation over Opus Dei’s moral failings. Fainthearted as I was, I would probably have put up with them indefinitely, if I could only have kept believing in Catholicism. And I think I might have kept believing in Catholicism, however implausible, if it didn’t demand—of me and, in my fevered undergraduate imagination, of everyone, everywhere, forever, at least in principle—the sacrificium intellectus, a willingness to stop thinking if thinking placed you in danger of losing your soul. If it were just my own intellect, I think I would have sacrificed it. But it felt, however absurdly, as though I were deciding for all of humanity. In the end, I couldn’t give everyone’s intellectual freedom away.

“Be ye as cunning as serpents and as guileless as doves,” Jesus admonished his disciples. (Matthew 10:16.) No one who has ever encountered Opus Dei would deny that they are as cunning as serpents. But no one who reads Gareth Gore’s Opuscan possibly believe that they’re as guileless as doves.