Opus Dei: An Investigation into the Secret Society Struggling for Power Within the Roman Catholic Church.

An Investigation into the Secret Society Struggling for Power within the Roman Catholic Church 

Michael Walsh

Harper SanFrancisco, $18.95, 230 pp.

In July 1941, Cardinal Pedro Segura of Seville wrote to the papal nuncio in Madrid, replying to his queries about Opus Dei. In his letter he mused about his ignorance of the group and how the rigorously secret character of the organization had frustrated his investigations. As a result, he had to confess ignorance as to whether Opus Dei's work was political, social, or apostolic, but he professed little confidence in the group since it seemed to be adopting methods that were alien to the tradition of the church.

This vignette is but one example of the genuine investigative work that Michael Walsh has carried out in writing of the history, operations, and ecclesiastical shenanigans of Opus Dei and its newly beatified founder, Josematra Escriva de Balaguer y Albas. To me, as a university chaplain for fifteen years, Opus Dei's secretive and highly dubious methods had clearly made them seem like a cult operating within the Catholic church. Walsh's study corroborates my experience and validates my fears about an organization that has been juridically engrafted into the Body of Christ since 1982.

Defenders of this ecclesiastical hybrid often cite the "correct" relations that Opus Dei maintains with the Catholic hierarchy as evidence that it operates above board and that its work has the' approbation of the Vatican. But Walsh's investigation reveals that there is a strategy at work behind this correctness (as well as its hyperorthodoxy). Opus Dei seems to be intent on remaking Catholicism in the image of Escriva and his spiritualized bourgeois authoritarianism. Walsh's readers will find plenty of reason to ignore the book's minor repetitions and awkward translation from Spanish originals, and to thank its author for ferreting out the source documents and minimal "paper trail" that this secretive society has allowed into the public eye. Piecing together material from Opus Dei's publications, from an anonymously donated copy of their 1982 constitution, and from stories of a few higher-up defectors, Walsh traces the anomalies in the organization to its founder.

Walsh gives a far more objective portrait of the founder and the "Catholic" sect he left behind than emerges in Opus Dei's own hagiographies. Though Escriva is a man who labeled "honors, distinctions, titles, things of air, puffs of pride, lies, nothingness," he petitioned Franco's government in 1968, and was granted the title of Marques of Peralta. During his life, he laid plans for his own canonization. He insisted that his followers claim their financial just due from their professional work, but discouraged almsgiving, recommending instead the "apostolate of not giving." He repeatedly claimed that there was nothing secret about Opus Dei, while seeking permission from the Vatican to withhold its entire constitution from bishops in whose dioceses its members were working. That 1950 document (most of which remained in force after Opus Dei was made a "personal prelature" in 1982) enjoined secrecy on Opus Dei members, forbade their speaking to nonmembers about whether they themselves belonged to the institute, and recommended that young recruits not divulge their membership to parents.

The secrecy that Walsh chronicles has allowed Opus Dei to maintain an aura of "chosenness." In the mid-eighties, two college students who had joined up were furious with my contention that they were not members of the "personal prelature" as such. The Code of Canon Law is "unequivocal" in its restriction of membership to deacons and priests. The two wouldn't believe that they were just ordinary lay folk. But, the clerical leadership of Opus Dei constantly touts it as an organization that pre-empted Vatican II's rehabilitation of the laity. The claim is disingenuous because, beneath the veneer of lay leadership, the prelature is exactly that: an organization in which the clergy are preferred.

But lack of candor is woven into the very nature of Opus Dei. Escriva, whose 999 Maxims are one of Walsh's sources, was convinced during the anticlerical days of the Spanish Republic that Catholicism could be saved only by those willing to practice "holy intransigence, holy coercion, holy shamelessness." Armed with that code, he decided to fill the vacuum created by the removal of the church from public life with caudillaje, his unquestioned leadership. Walsh's interpretive reading of Escriva's sayings might be charged with taking them out of context. But in fact, following their leader, Opus Dei presents them as nothing less than timeless.

In this, they are only obeying the founder, who taught that the organization was given by God and, hence, beyond historical context: "as long as there are men on earth, there will be Opus Dei...it is holy, unchangeable, and everlasting." Opus Dei has canonized the ecclesiology of the early twentieth century and considers itself a "perfect society," one that possesses all the means necessary to achieve its God-given purpose. It has adopted all the authoritarian trappings to boot: an absolute leader, a timeless law, a hierarchical structure with more ranks than the army, and with women in secondary roles.

Both before Vatican II and since, Rome has bent the rules to allow Opus Dei to function, contravening the law that disallows women's religious institutes from being dependent on their male equivalents. Its excessive clericalism makes the Vatican comfortable, perhaps because of the "devotion" which its members profess to their bishops and to the pope most especially. But, Walsh argues, the sectarian nature of Opus Dei gives it a distinctly "Calvinistic outlook." He also notes that some observers see the organization "falling into the error of Pelagianism," of "believing that, with the guidance of the founder' s wisdom, they can attain sanctity by their own efforts." While it goes through the motions of being obedient, Opus Dei is seeking to use institutional Catholicism for its own ends. Though presenting themselves as hyperCatholics, they have set out to "save the church by...faithfulness to the Father," that is, Escriva, not God. Yet their fetishizing of "rigid dogma," a product, perhaps, of Spain in the 1930s, when organized into a timeless religious system, cannot seem anything other than a deformed Catholicism. Arguing this point, Walsh contends that, based on Opus Dei's "rules and regulations, its censorship, its control of the minutiae of its members' day-to-day living, its class-related structures, its association with elites of wealth and power...it is not merely, as a sect, less than Catholic. It is less than Christian." To this reviewer, it is a well-argued point in a welldocumented work.