Opus Dei – Myths &
Reality
The Word From Rome, December 16, 2005, Vol. 5, No. 16
John L. Allen Jr., Vatican Correspondent
jallen@natcath.org John L. Allen Jr.
From Where I Stand
I've been traveling recently
related to my book Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind
the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic church
(Doubleday). I was in
The book itself is available here: www.amazon.com.
By now I've fielded questions from
media outlets and ordinary readers in various parts of the world, and I have a
fairly good sense of what's on people's minds. I thought I'd present some of
this material this week in Q & A format.
Why did you write this book?
I often give talks on the
My original idea was to write a
magazine-style piece on Opus Dei, interviewing the prelate, meaning the bishop
in charge, about all the standard debates: secrecy, money, power, women,
corporal mortification, and so on. To prepare myself, I looked at what had
already been published, assuming that someone would have done a straight-ahead
reporter's book to separate fact from fiction. To my surprise, I found that
such a book did not exist. There's an ocean of literature that Opus Dei itself
has produced, and a few highly critical outsider's books, but little else.
That's the hole I wanted to fill --
a book that had no axe to grind, and that didn't carry water for any particular
point of view, which would be of use to people in trying to understand what Opus
Dei is all about. Further, Opus Dei is a classic illustration of what we might
call the "Wojtyla Revolution" inside Roman
Catholicism. By way of analogy to the "Reagan Revolution" in American
politics, John Paul II changed the terms of debate in the church. In October
1978, it was to some extent an open question, at least in the popular mind,
whether Catholicism would evolve in the direction of mainline Western
Christianity, embracing steadily more progressive positions on issues such as
women clergy and gay rights, or whether it would reassert a more traditional
vision of its identity and thereby challenge modernity on its own terms. Not in
a narrow or fundamentalist way, but in a clear way, John Paul embraced the
second option. On his watch, the old Catholic right
became the center, and the center became the left. Opus Dei was in a sense the
boat lifted highest by that tide, and thus opens a window onto deeper and
broader trends.
Finally, thinking as a Catholic
rather than strictly as a journalist, I've long been concerned about divisions
within the church. One of the tragedies of 20th century American Catholic
history is that we spent the first part of the century clawing our way out of a
ghetto imposed by a hostile Protestant majority, and we've spent the second
part of the century constructing ideological ghettoes of our own choosing. The
polarization surrounding Opus Dei is a case in point. My hunch was that if we
can have a patient, rational conversation about Opus Dei, we should be able to
do it about anything. back to top
Is your book a response to the Da Vinci Code?
No. For some time I refused even to
read the Da Vinci Code so I could avoid going on
television to talk about it. It wasn't until well after I signed the contract
for this book that I read the novel. I cite it only once, opening my chapter on
corporal mortification with Dan Brown's over-heated scene featuring the albino
monk-assassin Silas whipping himself into an ecstatic frenzy. (I note ruefully
that one reviewer called this lone citation from Brown "the most gripping
piece of writing" in my entire book!)
On the other hand, Brown didn't
pick Opus Dei at random. In some sectors of public opinion, Opus Dei already
had a profile as a dark, mysterious, cult-like force. Thus while my book is not
a response to the Da Vinci Code, it is an exploration
of the controversies and images surrounding Opus Dei of which the Da Vinci Code represents the most popular expression.
As a footnote, the artist who
designed the cover for my book is the same one who did the Da
Vinci Code cover. We'll see if it has the same impact
on sales! back to top
Are you a member of Opus Dei?
No, and neither is anyone in my
family, nor do I have any financial or professional relationship with Opus Dei.
This is not an "authorized" study. Further, my experience of
traveling to eight countries and logging more than 300 hours of interviews
convinced me that I'm unsuited for membership in Opus Dei, in the sense that
I'm too insistent about control over my own time and space to feel comfortable
for very long with the degree of structure that comes with membership. I
therefore came at this book as an outsider, though one trying to understand
Opus Dei, as much as possible, on its own terms.
What was your biggest surprise?
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein's
famous quip, how little "there" is really there. To judge by Opus Dei's public image, one would think it's a mammoth social
force with great wealth and power. Yet even by the standards of the Catholic
church, Opus Dei is a relatively small group, only modestly influential, with a
profile similar to many other lay associations or even mid-sized dioceses.
To take the basic numbers, Opus Dei
has a worldwide membership of 85,000, which is roughly equivalent to the
Diocese of Hobart on the
Opus Dei's
global wealth -- meaning the physical value of all the assets listed as
"corporate works" of Opus Dei -- is around 2.8 billion. For one frame
of comparison, General Motors in 2003 reported assets of $455 billion. Even by
Catholic standards, Opus Dei's wealth is not terribly
impressive; in 2003, the Archdiocese of Chicago reported assets of $2.5
billion. The American lay organization the Knights of Columbus runs an
insurance program which all by itself is worth $6 billion.
In terms of power, Opus Dei numbers
only 40 out of more than 4,500 Catholic bishops worldwide, including only two
members of the College of Cardinals, and just 20 out of more than 2,500
employees in the Roman Curia, including only one head of a policy-making
agency. In truth, Opus Dei's potential to "call
the shots" inside Catholicism is far more limited than many imagine. For
every
Despite being a vaunted recruiting
machine, Opus Dei's growth rate is pretty small.
Worldwide they add about 650 members a year, and in some places they're
basically stalled. In the
All this suggests that Opus Dei is
not as imposing as some of the mythology would lead one to believe. Ironically,
the people most determined to believe in Opus Dei's
occult power are generally not its members, but its critics, who see its modest
structure as masking vast unseen influence. back to
top
Is Opus Dei a cult?
Sociologists of religion often say
that "cult" is not an academic term, but a pejorative word for a religious
group someone doesn't like. Hence it's difficult to answer this question with
any precision. In common parlance, "cult" usually means a group whose
members are under the sway of someone else, no longer thinking or acting for
themselves. It often carries a note of potential danger, either to oneself or
to others. (Think of the Aum Shinri
Kyo cult in Japan that carried out the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway).
On the basis of my experience, all
I can say is that I didn't meet anyone in Opus Dei who seemed to fit that
profile. The vast majority of members I met seemed healthy, well-adjusted,
intelligent, running their own lives, and posing no threat to themselves or to
others.
To be sure, there is a strong
degree of cohesion inside Opus Dei on core matters, principally the faith and
morals of the Catholic church and the founding vision
of St. Josemaría Escrivá.
Moreover, there's a degree of structure for members, especially "numeraries" (the 20 percent of members who are
celibate and live in Opus Dei centers) that many people would find suffocating.
Numeraries generally do not go to movies or sporting
events, they are expected to consult an Opus Dei "data base" before
reading certain books, they make interventions in one
another's lives called "fraternal corrections," and so on.
I never had the impression,
however, that anyone was being subjected to this regime by coercion or
"mind control." For the most part, members seem to experience this
structure as liberating rather than confining, helping them become the kind of
person they wish to be.
Is it a secret society?
Not by conventional definitions of
the term. Unlike Skull and Bones, for example, Opus Dei's
existence is a public fact. You can find listings for their offices in the
local phone book, and basic statistical data appears every year in the Vatican Annuario. Opus Dei runs a much-trafficked Web site,
offering all kinds of information about the group's history, spirituality, and
works. The names of Opus Dei's leaders are a matter
of public record, as are the group's statutes (at least in Latin).
Where do perceptions of secrecy
come from?
First, Opus Dei leaves it up to
members to decide whether to acknowledge their membership to others. For
"supernumeraries," the seventy percent of members who are married,
live in their own homes, and have normal secular jobs,
this provision means that sometimes even friends and neighbors may sometimes be
left to speculate about whether so-and-so is "Opus Dei." It also
means that whenever a prominent person is rumored to be a member, such as
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
or pundit Robert Novak, Opus Dei declines to comment, and so journalists are
reduced to contacting these figures individually. (The answer in both cases, by
the way, is "no").
Second, Opus Dei does not use
recognizable Opus Dei vocabulary to identify its facilities or publications.
For example, its student center at the University of
Notre Dame is called "Windmoor," not the
"
Third, Opus Dei resists spelling
out certain aspects of its internal life, or reducing complex matters of its
culture and spirit to the cold language of a policy or procedure. Thus when
someone asks what exactly a member of Opus Dei does,
or what the reality is about corporal mortification or finances (all perfectly
legitimate questions), the usual answer is "come and see," or
"get to know us." There's no pamphlet to hand the curious spelling
these matters out in black-and-white.
Seen from inside, none of this is
about secrecy, but fidelity to St. Josemaria Escriva's vision of a body of lay Catholics,
indistinguishable in any external sense from their friends and colleagues, but
on fire with the gospel. That's not to say, however, that Opus Dei can't do a
better job of making itself transparent.
What about the whips and chains?
Generally speaking, the standard
controversies about Opus Dei separate into two categories when you take a hard
look: Those that are more or less pure myth (money, power and recruiting
efficiency, for example), and those that even after a painstaking effort to
understand, still remain matters of debate.
Corporal mortification falls into
that second category.
In brief, the celibate members of
Opus Dei (thus a minority, roughly 30 percent) engage in two forms of
self-inflicted pain each week. First, they wear a spiked chain around the thigh
called a cilice for two hours a day, except Sunday; second, they use a small
cloth whip called a "discipline" on the back once a week for a few
minutes, usually while reciting an "Our Father" or a "Hail
Mary." Members are careful to point out that these are carefully
circumscribed mild practices, nothing like the bloody self-flagellation
described by Brown.
Why do it?
First, use of such instruments has
a deep warrant in Catholic spirituality. Great saints of the church, both past
and present, have used them, including Sts. Dominic,
Francis, Padre Pio and Mother Teresa.
Second, Opus Dei is by no means the
only group in the church today to use the cilice and discipline. The difference
between these others and Opus Dei is simply that few people have ever heard of
them.
Third, Opus Dei spiritual directors
say the point of the cilice and discipline is to remind oneself of the
realities of physical suffering in the world and of sin, and to identify with
the suffering of Christ on the Cross.
My experience, however, is that you
can say all this until you're blue in the face, and some people just aren't
going to buy it. For a typical 21st century Western sensibility, these
practices can't help but seem suspect at best, too easily open to abuse at
worst. It's one among several areas where Opus Dei bucks the cultural tide.
One other point worth making … Opus
Dei members say the practice of self-mortification is much broader than the
cilice or discipline, and usually involves ordinary acts such as being generous
with someone, or taking out the garbage when it's not your turn. Nothing about
the spirit of Opus Dei, they say, rises or falls on corporal mortification. back to top
What about women?
Here's another second-category
controversy, i.e., one that doesn't just go away upon examination.
To lay out the facts, about 55
percent of Opus Dei's members are women. Opus Dei is
divided into two separate branches, with one governing body for women and
another for men, both in
Opus Dei's
internal life is marked by a strict separation between the genders. Men and
women live in separate centers, attend separate
workshops and retreats, and those who work for Opus Dei generally do so in
separate offices. Opus Dei schools are not only single-sex, but the faculties
are segregated as well, so that men teach at a boy's school and women at a
girl's school.
There is also a sub-group of
roughly 4,000 female numeraries called
"associates," whose full-time work is the domestic care of Opus Dei
centers. In practice, this often means cooking, cleaning, sewing, and other
household tasks. While members stress that associates perform these tasks for
both men's and women's centers, the result is that while women clean up after
men, the men never clean up after the women.
Once again, there's a logic to these practices.
First, Opus Dei is a novelty in the
history of the Catholic church -- an organic body of
men and women, lay and clergy, sharing the same vocation and falling under the
same canonical authority. Over the centuries, the
Second, Opus Dei women told me they
experience the separation as liberation. They run their own affairs, without
looking over their shoulder for direction from a man. Further, they say, it's
sometimes easier to deliver spiritual programming for an all-female crowd, such
as a workshop on the spirituality of mothering.
Third, on the subject of the numerary assistants, Opus Dei members usually insist that
it's a plain fact -- however politically incorrect it may be to say so out loud
-- that women have a knack for home-making that men lack. Further, they say,
this institution was part of the foundational vision of Escrivá,
and that's that.
Once again, my experience of trying
to explain all this to many Catholics, to say nothing of secular observers, is
that many may be willing to grant the logic, but they still can't help seeing
it as an archaic conception of gender roles that in the end subjugates women.
Doesn't Opus Dei have a lot of
influence in secular politics?
Yes and no. It was an article of
faith for Escrivá that Opus Dei as such must never
have a corporate political "line." He avoided expressing political opinions, for fear that Opus Dei members would feel
compelled to follow whatever he said because "the Father" had spoken.
His core idea was that individual Opus Dei members, using their own freedom and
responsibility, would decide for themselves what the proper political
application of Christian doctrine would be in a given set of circumstances.
In practice, this means that Opus
Dei has no position on whether there should be a strong central government or a
minimal state, no position on whether the war in Iraq is justified or not, no
position on budgets or tax policies. In
Yet Opus Dei does nevertheless have
a disproportionate political influence relative to its size and means in two
senses.
First, because Opus Dei emphasizes
"thinking with the church," where the Catholic church
has a clear political line, Opus Dei members are in lock-step. On abortion,
homosexuality, stem cell research and other "culture wars,"
therefore, Opus Dei members are almost uniformly on the right, meaning that one
can identify an Opus Dei contribution to conservative stances on these issues.
Second, Opus Dei members are
probably more likely than Catholics in general to be active in politics,
because of their emphasis on the "unity of life." Because
sanctification of the secular world is their prime directive, Opus Dei members
feel an unusually powerful call to roll up their sleeves and get involved in
secular affairs. Hence were Opus Dei members are active politically, they're
likely to be unusually committed, and therefore sometimes unusually
influential.
Does Opus Dei engage in
heavy-handed recruiting tactics? Do they "brain-wash"?
"Heavy-handed" is a
slippery term; one person's undue pressure is another's passion. Yet there are
enough witnesses, both former members and those who never joined, who testified
to feeling their arms being twisted by Opus Dei members to suggest there must
be a basis of reality to these charges. To tell the truth, it would be
surprising were it not so. Opus Dei members are deeply
convinced that God has given them something precious, and their ardent desire
to bring that message to as many people as possible means they can sometimes
come on a little strong.
Over the years, Opus Dei has had to
learn a certain maturity on this point. Cooler heads realize the last thing the
organization needs is another generation of bitter ex-members. Indeed, in my
travels I often encountered passionate young people who made the opposite
complaint; they want badly to join, and Opus Dei directors keep telling them to
wait, to pray, and to think.
In any event, Opus Dei is not the
voracious recruiting machine of myth. After 70 years, Opus Dei only counts
85,000 members worldwide. It adds about 650 a year. If each numerary
were truly doing what some have suggested Escrivá
wanted them to do, namely, adding five new members a year, there should have
been 82,000 new members each year over the last four years, for a total of
328,000 new members. In reality, the numeraries of
Opus Dei fell short of that quota by a whopping 325,397. If this were a
corporation and the numeraries were its sales force,
most of them would be out looking for work. The evidence suggests that however
strong the pressure may be to join, most people are able to walk away.
As for "brain-washing,"
there is a strong program of doctrinal and spiritual formation inside Opus Dei
that produces remarkable uniformity on core principles. Yet my experience is
that most people undergoing this formation want it. They signed on precisely
because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves, something
that offers meaning and direction. If that's brain-washing, so is the Marine
Corps, and so on.
On the other hand, the sheer number
of critical ex-members around the world suggests their reports are more than
isolated cases. Sometimes Opus Dei leaders have exerted undue pressure on
people to join, have not responded adequately to legitimate questions, have
demanded too much personal disclosure and have insisted too much on obedience
to superiors. This seems less so today than in earlier eras, but the potential
is still there. Such behavior should be no surprise, because any group made up
of passionate believers can sometimes shade off into excess. The on-going
challenge for Opus Dei, as for other bodies in the church, is to ensure that
accountability and transparency are built into the system; Pope John Paul II
said in 1984 that the church should be a “house of glass where all can see what
is happening,” an exhortation that applies to Opus Dei as well.
What's the relationship between
Opus Dei and Benedict XVI?
To take a step back, there was a
strong personal affinity between Pope John Paul II and Opus Dei. Coming out of
the Solidarity experience in
Benedict certainly knows and
admires Opus Dei. One of the most important consultors
to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during his tenure there was
Msgr. Fernando Ocáriz, the number two official in
Opus Dei. Ocáriz was among the primary authors of the
controversial 2000
Yet he does not have the direct,
biographical affection for it that John Paul did. Among the movements, his
closest ties are to Communion and Liberation, not Opus Dei. I suspect that over
time this may prove to be positive for Opus Dei, since part of the resentment
that surrounded it in the John Paul years was the perception that it was the
"beloved disciple" of the pope, constantly favored at every turn.
Under Benedict, it will likely appear as one among many groups the pope smiles
upon, generating less of a sense of special treatment.
How has Opus Dei responded to
the book?
Officially they haven't said
anything. Individually, some members have told me they don't like the book
because they believe it concentrates too much on the controversies. Others have
praised it, saying that it seems to more or less deliver on its promise of
objectivity.
An American cardinal and the
prelate of Opus Dei, Bishop Javier Echevarría Rodríguez, discussed my book outside the pope's apartment
in late October, but at that stage the prelate hadn't yet read it and so didn't
express an opinion.
Bottom line: Is Opus Dei good or
bad?
It's not my job to answer that
question. At most, I hope the book provides some basic tools for holding a
rational conversation on the subject.
There are, however, two points I'd
make.
As long as the Catholic church is animated by what John Paul II called the
"ecclesiology of communion," diversity should be a source of
strength. The constant danger, however, is a kind of ecclesiastical
Balkanization. When we see ourselves not as different members of a common body,
but more like Croats and Serbs in the old
Further, in drawing judgments about
Opus Dei, it's important that the heart of its message be considered, not just
the controversies and question marks. The founding vision was what Escrivá called the "sanctification of work,"
which means that lay men and women are to see the details of their daily
activity -- law, medicine, stay-at-home mothering, or collecting the garbage --
as the pathway not only to their own personal holiness, but to the redemption
of the world. Escrivá's vision, part of a ferment within early 20th century Christianity about the
divorce between religion and secular modernity, was a double challenge to the
ultra-hierarchical European Catholicism of the day. It posited that laity
rather than priests are the proper ones to figure out what a Christian approach
to politics or economics, or to any other secular endeavor, looks like; and it
asserted that the modern street is just as "religious" an environment
as the sacred precincts of a church building.
Whatever one makes of corporal
mortification or Opus Dei's
Anything else?
Just one correction to something
I've said on American television and radio this week, which, as it turns out,
is not accurate. In discussing the celebrated Ron Hanssen
spy case, I've said that Hanssen "is" a
member of Opus Dei. In fact, I should have said "was." Members who
have not made a permanent commitment, known as the "fidelity," have
to renew their membership each year on March 19, the Feast of St. Joseph, or
they're automatically no longer in Opus Dei. After his arrest Hanssen did not renew, and hence is no longer a member.
The e-mail address for John L.
Allen Jr. is jallen@natcath.org
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