In 2003 a diligent member of Opus Dei’s PR team spotted an item in Publisher’s Weekly about a forthcoming novel entitled The Da Vinci Code. After tracking down an advance copy, he discovered to his horror that it featured a self-flagellating albino assassin used by the Catholic organisation to murder its opponents.
The alarmed press man took the matter to his Opus Dei boss who, after some consideration, calmly reassured him that Dan Brown’s novel sounded “so silly that nobody will ever buy it”.
For many years the ultra-conservative Catholic organisation that emerged in Franco’s Spain was often regarded as a cartoonish sect, with insufficient mainstream attention paid to the testimony of ex-members and victims alleging decades of financial control, coercion and sexual abuse.
Gareth Gore’s vividly told and excellently researched book Opus is part of a more recent journalistic reconsideration of the accountability of a group that began as the dream of a young Spanish priest and grew into an international network able to mould not only the agenda of the Catholic Church, but exert influence over one of Spain’s largest banks and even the US Supreme Court.
Gore’s story begins with Josemaría Escrivá, who was born in 1902 in the small northern Spanish town of Barbastro. In his twenties, Escrivá claimed to have received a direct message from God and founded what is called “the Work”. Alarmed at the creep of secularism and communism during the Spanish civil war, this terrifyingly ambitious religious entrepreneur became intent on building his vision of an elite vanguard of Catholics. Returning to Madrid alongside “Caudillo” Franco’s troops, Escrivá started amassing followers on university campuses using cult-like recruitment techniques and systems of control.
The Opus Dei founder, who was invited by Franco to give him and his wife a private six-day spiritual retreat, steadily grew the cult of personality that came to define his organisation, demanding that his followers kneel in his presence and show him unquestioning loyalty.
None were meant to openly discuss their membership, and the group’s rules had been kept secret for much of its existence — even from the Vatican. Gore writes that Opus residences in the early years were bugged and books and newspapers in them were censored. Compromising information on members was kept in hidden dossiers, while those who began to collapse under the stress of membership were dosed up on tranquillisers. Others who decided to leave Escrivá’s orbit were threatened with ruin and ordered to never tell the world about the organisation’s secrets.
Escrivá had big dreams of expanding across the world — “Madrid? Valencia? Paris? The world!” One of his early key insights is that he needed to grow its numbers beyond an inner core. He began to target wealthy and influential laypeople, allowing them to join as “supernumeraries”, members who can live regular lives and start families but must agree to hand over a chunk of their salaries to Opus each month.
This burning ambition required significant amounts of cash. Money, and the constant pursuit of it, soon becomes a core competence of Escrivá’s organisation.
Gore frames Opus around the rise and fall of Banco Popular, a Spanish bank that appeared to be a regular high street lender, but had for decades been under the influence of Opus Dei through its chairman, Luis Valls Taberner, who had been recruited into The Work in its early days by Escrivá. Using a convoluted network of ostensibly private companies and shareholders dubbed “the syndicate”, Opus-connected entities and businessmen received vast sums in dividends, favourable loans and donations from Popular to grow.
The students that Escrivá cultivates grow into influential figures in Franco’s dictatorship, and Opus members start to rise into positions as government ministers and captains of industry. Meanwhile many women recruited into Opus work as unpaid domestic servants at the group’s centres, barred from speaking to their families and trapped.
Opus Dei uses the vast sums coming in from Banco Popular and the group’s well-heeled members to build a global real estate empire. Escrivá buys up a palace in Rome called Villa Tevere replete with a luxury apartment for the founder, as well as 12 dining rooms and 14 chapels — an opulence defended by the founder with the justification: “It shows that we pray more than we eat.”
In its early years, Opus still operated in an uneasy and undefined relationship with the Vatican, but by the 1970s, Opus Dei and its founder were in the centre of the Catholic world. Escrivá would die in 1975, but the election of the conservative John Paul II that same year finally saw the group embraced by Rome, with Escrivá later canonised under the Polish pontiff.
It is the organisations’s growth in the US that left, for Gore, its most lasting legacy on the modern world. The second half of the book focuses on how Opus Dei through the 1990s and 2000s built alliances with American conservative Catholic elites, developing a powerful “dark money” funding machine and aiding figures such as the lawyer Leonard Leo to shape the US Supreme Court and wage a campaign against abortion rights and gay marriage.
Gore writes that “almost a century from its founding, Opus Dei appears to have come full circle, by fanning the culture wars and fuelling deep divisions that risk ripping our society apart”. Today, Opus Dei is faced with a liberal Pope, legal cases relating to horrific allegations of historical abuse, and a tarnished international reputation. As its centenary approaches, books such as Opus will ensure that — in the public arena at least — the organisation will be held accountable for its past.
Opus: Dark Money, a Secretive Cult, and Its Mission to Remake Our World by Gareth Gore Scribe £25/Simon & Schuster $30.99, 448 pages
Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the FT. His book ‘Chasing Shadows: A True Story of the Mafia, Drugs and Terrorism’ is now out in paperback
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