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Gareth Gore’s book about the international Catholic group is more interested in domestic political in-fighting.
To put it bluntly, Opus Dei has a big problem.
In the nearly 100 years since its founding, countless stories have emerged about leaders, priests, and lay members in the Catholic Church’s sole “personal prelature”—a kind of floating diocese defined not by geography but by a set of practices and devotions—embroiled in scandal. Members have been tied to fraudand financial crime.
Tell-all books and lurid novels have portrayed its founder, Josemaría Escrivá, as a villain. And its guiding ethos, the “sanctification of everyday life,” seems to be frequently conflated with career ambition at best and authoritarian right-wing politics at worst.
Why is Opus Dei so seemingly scandal-ridden? Determining that answer matters if the prelature is to be reformed, as Pope Francis appears intent on doing. But assuming there’s more to it than just a media phenomenon, it’s often been unclear what kind of problem the prelature’s critics are even trying to identify. Is the ultimate source of Opus Dei’s scandals personal or structural? Religious errors or worldly temptations? Individual bad actors or a top-down, globe-spanning conspiracy?
Financial journalist Gareth Gore’s new book Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church insists the answer is all of the above. Meant at first to be about the collapse of a major numerary-led Spanish bank, Opus takes the reader down branching rabbit holes into the biography of Escrivá, through a series of financial and abuse scandals, then finally into an ecosystem of right-of-center political nonprofits in the United States. In all these sub-topics, Gore argues that Opus Dei, its priests, and its lay members have committed abuse, fraud, trafficking, and more; are obsessed with power, money, and interpersonal control; and aim to remake the world according to a right-wing political agenda.
Continued below.
thedispatch.com
To put it bluntly, Opus Dei has a big problem.
In the nearly 100 years since its founding, countless stories have emerged about leaders, priests, and lay members in the Catholic Church’s sole “personal prelature”—a kind of floating diocese defined not by geography but by a set of practices and devotions—embroiled in scandal. Members have been tied to fraudand financial crime.
Tell-all books and lurid novels have portrayed its founder, Josemaría Escrivá, as a villain. And its guiding ethos, the “sanctification of everyday life,” seems to be frequently conflated with career ambition at best and authoritarian right-wing politics at worst.
Why is Opus Dei so seemingly scandal-ridden? Determining that answer matters if the prelature is to be reformed, as Pope Francis appears intent on doing. But assuming there’s more to it than just a media phenomenon, it’s often been unclear what kind of problem the prelature’s critics are even trying to identify. Is the ultimate source of Opus Dei’s scandals personal or structural? Religious errors or worldly temptations? Individual bad actors or a top-down, globe-spanning conspiracy?
Financial journalist Gareth Gore’s new book Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church insists the answer is all of the above. Meant at first to be about the collapse of a major numerary-led Spanish bank, Opus takes the reader down branching rabbit holes into the biography of Escrivá, through a series of financial and abuse scandals, then finally into an ecosystem of right-of-center political nonprofits in the United States. In all these sub-topics, Gore argues that Opus Dei, its priests, and its lay members have committed abuse, fraud, trafficking, and more; are obsessed with power, money, and interpersonal control; and aim to remake the world according to a right-wing political agenda.
Continued below.
Opus Dei’s One Big Conspiracy That Wasn’t
Gareth Gore’s book about the international Catholic group is more interested in domestic political in-fighting.
thedispatch.com
