Literary / Arts
John L. Allen Jr.: Star Witness for the Exoneration of Opus Dei
Terry Eagleton
Volume 28 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 29, 2014
With the success of The Da Vinci Code, the right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei came in for some doubtlessly unwelcome publicity – unwelcome, that is, because Opus Dei is hardly the kind of outfit that likes to bawl its business from the rooftops. Its critics have seen it as a cross between the Moonies, the Masons, and the Mafia, with its own religious version of omertà, or the code of silence.
Renegade members are not generally found encased in concrete at the bottom of the Hudson, but a number of them describe taking years to recover from the trauma of ever having joined.
With the success of The Da Vinci Code, the right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei came in for some doubtlessly unwelcome publicity – unwelcome, that is, because Opus Dei is hardly the kind of outfit that likes to bawl its business from the rooftops. Its critics have seen it as a cross between the Moonies, the Masons, and the Mafia, with its own religious version of omertà, or the code of silence.
Renegade members are not generally found encased in concrete at the bottom of the Hudson, but a number of them describe taking years to recover from the trauma of ever having joined.
What is this strange, secretive association, and why is it in business? Opus Dei, which means “Work of God”, is not a religious order but an international association of lay people and clerics within the Catholic Church dedicated to the task of attaining personal holiness. The aim is to do so not by withdrawing from the world, but by remaining active in it. Ironically, this notion of finding saintliness through one’s secular calling is more Protestant than Catholic.
Unlike some other Christian organizations, however, the group does not exist to help others through works of charity. Members pray together, run projects, and meet regularly for spiritual pep talks, workshops, retreats, annual courses, and meditations. Opus Dei is an odd combination of worldliness and asceticism. If it runs some high-powered business schools, its members also flagellate themselves, and its celibate members – who make up about 30 percent of the organization – wear spiked chains around the upper thigh for two hours a day.
Briskly modern in its social and economic practice, Opus Dei is profoundly antimodern in its ideology. The group has at present over 80,000 members throughout the world, some of whom make vows of celibacy and live in Opus Dei centers, whereas others lead ordinary domestic lives.
Opus Dei members are expected to hand over a portion of their salaries to the organization, and some of them work for Opus Dei exclusively. Globally speaking, the movement is estimated to hold assets of about $2.8 billion; it runs fifteen universities, seven hospitals, eleven business schools, and a large number of primary, secondary, and technical schools. Assiduously courted by the late Pope John Paul II, it has become a formidable underground force for traditionalist values and political reaction within the Catholic Church.
The setup has many features of a cult, expecting drastic obedience from its members and practicing some draconian disciplines. Its champions view it as restoring traditional holiness to a world bereft of spiritual values; its critics see it as recruiting professional Catholics in order to form a secretive power bloc within nations and governments.
John Allen’s survey of this bizarre phenomenon is really a case for the defense thinly disguised as a dispassionate account. His book is partisanship masquerading as objectivity. Allen provides evidence both pro and con, but the tone and tenor of his emollient prose create a general air of exoneration. Opus Dei is rapped lightly over the knuckles from time to time but found not guilty of the grave allegations against it.
DISINGENUOUS
On the whole, Allen’s idea of objectivity is to set out a criticism of Opus Dei and then try to refute it, as though by airing the criticism at all he has set forth the case for the prosecution. A good deal of his material comes from Opus Dei members themselves, which is rather like asking Tom Cruise to spill the beans on Scientology.
The book is a masterpiece of disingenuousness, which is not to suggest that it is consciously deceitful. It seems, rather, an exercise in self-deception by a Catholic Vaticanologist who is loath to think badly of such a powerful arm of his church, and who consequently goes in for a scandalous amount of mental shuffling.
Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, a priest who was affectionately known to his followers as the Padre.
Escrivá commented that he never wanted to found anything, since everything he did was supposedly by divine will. The claim conveniently combines groveling humility with absolute authority. Anyone who acted against him thereby acted against God. Escrivá was so remarkably humble that he compared his summoning of his disciples to Christ’s gathering of His own twelve followers, and habitually ended letters with the words “May Jesus watch over you for me,” as though Jesus were a security chief on his payroll.
There is plenty of evidence that this saint of the Church could be paranoid, self-aggrandizing, vain, and dictatorial. He was also a mightily ambitious political wheeler-dealer, despite his pious insistence that his organization promoted only “super natural” ends, which seem to have included amassing an enormous amount of money.
Allen acknowledges a few of the charges against Escrivá, quotes some testimony to support them and then rapidly summons the witnesses for the defense, who speak of the priest’s kindness, holiness, and sense of humor. We even learn that Escrivá once helped a carsick friend after he had vomited all over himself. The book also records the Padre’s cheery, Jay Leno-like way with an audience of devoted fans, cracking jokes, making faces and generally unburdening himself of a series of platitudes that Allen manages to mistake for homespun Christian wisdom.
One of the most sensitive issues remains Opus Dei’s origins in Francoite Spain. Official accounts of the movement are understandably coy about the fact that from the 1930s to the 1970s the organization served to provide some of the leading cadres of a fascist regime – one that in the name of the Christian gospel had perpetrated a series of monstrous atrocities during the civil war that brought it to power.
Several of Franco’s cabinet ministers were Opus Dei members; Escrivá was once in charge of the Generalisimo’s spiritual exercises; and a Francoite cleric appended an enthusiastic preface to The Way, Escrivá intellectually third-rate personal manifesto. Franco himself is said to have remarked that if Opus Dei was attacked, it was because it served his regime. Its members, he asserted, were “honorable and worthy gentlemen.”
In seeking to exculpate the organization, Allen points out (a frequent gambit in the book) that others at the time were in the same situation. Most Spanish Catholics supported Hitler too, and hordes of Soviets wept when Stalin died. It is curious for a Catholic like Allen to adopt what one might call the demographic or head-counting theory of morality; Christian faith is supposed to be a scandal to the powers of this world, not an ideology that legitimates them.
If Opus Dei’s notion of faith had been less privatized, less about inner purity and more about outer righteousness, it might have had the guts to act differently. Another of Allen’s limp extenuations is that other Catholic organizations, such as Catholic Action, served the Franco regime, too.
Franco was not just an unpleasantly reactionary Catholic, a sort of John Paul II with epaulets; Franco was a dictator who forbade free speech, ran a fearsome secret police, abolished civil rights, crammed his jails with political prisoners, ruthlessly crushed all political opposition, smashed the Spanish labor movement, and during the Second World War placed some of his nation’s military resources at the service of Adolf Hitler.
He presided over a repulsively macho regime, full of bogus rhetoric about virility and the martial virtues. Some Opus Dei members apparently volunteered to fight with the Nazi army, though their true intention, Allen reports, was to fight Bolshevism rather than support Hitler. So that’s all right then.
Escrivá is reported to have observed that Hitler had been “badly treated” by world opinion, and could never have killed six million Jews. Instead, he is alleged to have added, “it could only have been four million at the most.”
Opus Dei spokespersons, Allen remarks, find it implausible that their leader ever made such a comment, which is as much of a surprise as learning that the Elvis Presley fan club indignantly rejects the claim that its hero enjoyed watching half-naked teenagers wrestle. Alle goes on to quote a pro-Semitic remark Escrivá made to a Jew in a public session (would he have made an anti-Semitic one?), along with one or two approving comments made about the Padre by one or two Jews. As often occurs in this book the rasping sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped can be loudly heard.
MIND CONTROL
A good many Opus Dei members who have tunneled their way to freedom report on the group’s use of censorship and mind-control techniques. Allen, by contrast, makes the setup sound like an especially rowdy ideological wrangle in the House of Commons. His chapter on the subject, while nodding in the direction of such criticisms, is markedly slanted toward the testimony of loyal insiders who stoutly deny any such manipulation.
No less than one Opus Dei member, he tells us zestfully, publicly dissented from what seems to have been the majority’s enthusiasm for Mel Gibson’s drearily sensationalist The Passion of the Christ. Those skeptics who doubt that Opus Dei is a positive cockpit of pluralism will be dumbfounded to learn from the book that two of its members once disagreed in public about the history of the Catholic novel.
Not all Opus Dei members, however, are happy with this unbridled libertarianism. One of them wrote, “Freedom of conscience leads to the loss of faith, freedom of expression to demagogy, mental confusion, and pornography, and freedom of association to anarchism and totalitarianism.”
Allen cannot help but concede that Opus Dei used to open its members’ mail, and suggests, “No doubt the practice was open to abuse.” Having superiors snoop around one’s mail is nevertheless presented as a sign of one’s “total giving of self,” and, as one member helpfully observed, is “just a way of helping people understand that their life should be an open book.”
Books, however, aren’t quite as open in the organization as they might be: Opus Dei’s university students are not entirely free to read anything they like, and certain volumes are absent from their library shelves. If you are seen reading something darkly suspect – which according to Allen includes the fiction of that notorious subversive John Updike – a well-meaning colleague might make what is cryptically referred to as a “fraternal correction.”
Opus Dei is particularly keen on what it deviously calls “discretion,” which means that its members, in Masonic style, have been highly secretive over the years about their affiliation. Allen perversely interprets this secrecy as a refusal to brag.
The movement still refuses to publish a directory of its members, and its recruits often refuse to tell their families of their allegiance to it. Its centers and headquarters to under names that conceal their true proprietorship. Allen sees very little wrong with all this, and produces one specious reason after another to justify it.
What, then, of sex, which tends to preoccupy right-wing Catholics almost as much as it does professional pornographers? It is hard not to feel that Escrivá himself, who wrote of “the vile slime of the passions” and initially banned both women and married persons from his association, had something of a problem with this rather widespread human phenomenon.
Marriage, Escrivá writes, is for the rank and file, not for the officers of Christ’s army. It is for those too feeble-minded to control their appetites. The New Testament, which sees marriage and not celibacy as sacramental, seems, then, to be out of line with Opus Dei.
The Gospels also have strikingly little to say about sex, and when it does crop up, present Jesus as being notably relaxed about it. This can hardly be said for the Padre, who once reportedly dropped a key into a sewer rather than live in the same apartment as a young woman.
WOMEN
Men and women are strictly separated in almost all aspects of the movement’s activities, and all of its domestic work is carried out by female members. Remarkably enough, Allen seems to have been incapable of finding a single Opus Dei woman prepared to make the faintest criticism of her role. Scrubbing a toilet, one of them nobly remarks, is just as important as anything else.
In any case, so Opus Dei argues, women have an instinctive aptitude for creating a homelike environment; and as Allen remarks with his usual percipience, it’s easier for women to talk about such things as being mothers when men, who prefer to talk about sport, aren’t present.
The movement even wanted separate telephone and computer systems for men and women in its U.S. headquarters, a form of apartheid that the Taliban might regard as extreme. Allen, however, gallops to the rescue, having unearthed no less than two examples of “strong Opus Dei women,” one of whom turns out to teach her Kenyan female students housekeeping rather than mathematics.
Opus Dei women, Allen argues, do not feel like second-class citizens, even though he himself has just shown that they are. There is, he comments with exquisite understatement, a rather “traditional” understanding of gender roles in the group; but if ultimate authority within Opus Dei rests with men, he adds, so does it in the Catholic Church in general.
The idea that this, too, might be a disgrace never seems to cross his mind. To his credit, he tells the story of an Opus Dei hostel in which it was thought that the saintly young men were sneaking in women. A director ordered all the fire doors of the dormitory to be locked, remarking that it was better for all the students to burn in this life than for a few of them to burn in hell.
Having recounted a narrative somewhat against his own prejudices, Allen rather spoils the effect by describing this horrendous episode as an instance of Opus Dei “eccentricity.”
SPANISH
Sociologically speaking, the phenomenon of Opus Dei is not hard to understand. In its original Spanish context, it represented an attempt to harness certain traditional Spanish values – honor, discipline, hierarchy, austerity, and the like – to the project of modernizing a backward national capitalism.
For all of its talk of inner spirituality, it was, and to a great extent still is, an authoritarian and semi-clandestine enterprise that manages to infiltrate its indoctrinated technocrats, politicos, and administrators into the highest levels of the state. And few supposedly spiritual movements have proved so astute about making money.
Opus Dei tries to resolve this contradiction by the two-faced maneuver of not owning in name a huge range of institutions that belong to it in fact. Opus Dei, Allen informs us, is not rich – at least, he adds, not when compared with giant multinational corporations. Neither, on this scale of comparison, is the British monarchy.
With its spiritual elitism, well-heeled suburban mentality, and penchant for the rich and powerful, Escrivá’s brainchild long ago set its face against the “option for the poor” in the Catholic Church, one closely associated with Latin American liberation theology. Perhaps this is because its members prefer to read Escrivá’s theologically illiterate The Way rather than the New Testament.
At the beginning of Luke’s gospel, Mary, rejoicing in her pregnancy, recites some verses that speak of God as casting down the mighty and elevating the lowly, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Some New Testament scholars believe that the words that Luke puts into Mary’s mouth are a kind of Zealot chant – the Zealots being underground anti-imperial revolutionaries of its Roman occupiers. Opus Dei is about as remove from this kernel of the Christian Gospel as the God-fearing, gun-toting Pharisees of the rest of the Christian Right.
Like a number of other Opus Dei apologist, Allen is at pains to argue that the movement has evolved to suit modern times, changing its old autocratic ways. But one factor speaks strongly against that claim. Just at the point where such change might have come about, the Catholic Church elected John Paul II, a reactionary pope under whose patronage Opus Dei was able to carry on with many of its old habits.
Terry Eagleton is the author of more than thirty books including The New Left Church, and Holy Terror.
Terry Eagleton