Josemaria Escriva founded Opus Dei, an ultra-conservative, high-demand, secretive Catholic organization in Madrid, Spain, after receiving a supposed vision from God in 1928. His small inner circle initially initiated university students into strict obedience, celibacy, medieval practices of self-flagellation, and deceptive recruitment techniques to convert their friends.
Operating outside of the mainstream church, Opus Dei rose to prominence under Spain's authoritarian dictator, Francisco Franco. Escriva was eventually canonized as a saint while the group amassed enormous wealth and influence around the world.
Today, their reactionary religious and political mission has established a foothold in Washington DC through the Catholic Information Center—the tabernacle closest to the White House.Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, and Project 2025 mastermind, Kevin Roberts, all visit for spiritual guidance. Meanwhile, scandals and lawsuits involving child sex abuse, money laundering, and human trafficking plague Opus Dei's reputation. Gareth Gore joins us to discuss his controversial new book on the past and present of this secretive organization, Opus.
Show Notes
Pew Research Center: America’s News Influencers
How Opus Dei Converted DC
Gareth Gore Author page for his book, Opus
Opus Dei Paid $900K to Settle Sexual Misconduct Claim
Argentine Prosecutors Accuse Opus Dei of Human Trafficking
Maria del Carmen Tapia Book Summary on Opus Dei
Financial Times on Opus
Biblical omen uncovered in aftermath of Hurricane Helene | Daily Mail Online
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Spirituality 233, DC's Catholic Power Center.
After a vision from God in 1928, José María Escriva founded Opus Dei, an ultra-conservative, high-demand, secretive Catholic organization in Madrid, Spain.
He built a small inner circle at first, quietly initiating university students into strict obedience, celibacy, medieval practices of self-flagellation, and deceptive recruitment techniques to convert their friends.
Operating outside of the mainstream church, Opus Dei would rise to prominence under Spain's authoritarian dictator Francisco Franco.
Their founder, Escriva, would eventually be canonized as a saint, as the group amassed enormous wealth and influence around the world and maintained tight control over members.
Today, their reactionary religious and political mission has established a foothold in Washington, D.C. through the Catholic Information Center, which boasts of being the tabernacle closest to the White House.
Trump allies who visit for spiritual guidance include Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, and Project 2025 mastermind Kevin Roberts.
Meanwhile, scandals and lawsuits involving child sex abuse, money laundering, and human trafficking plague Opus Dei's reputation.
Today, we'll run my interview with Gareth Gore about his controversial new book, Opus.
This week in Conspirituality.
I was initially going to talk about the photo of RFK Jr. on Trump's private plane surrounded by Trump himself, Don Jr., Elon Musk, and Mike Johnson, in which Bobby has two McDonald's burgers, some fries, and a Coca-Cola on his plate.
Two burgers.
As do everyone else, right?
Yes.
I didn't want a food chain because whatever.
If you eat McDonald's, I don't care.
But earlier this week, Bobby criticized Trump's McDonald's habit in his tireless Maha Make America Healthy Again campaigning.
And hypocrisy honestly isn't anything new with this man.
You know, I think it's funny, Derek, that I don't know if you felt this too, Julian, but we were talking about how Bobby's regular criticisms of the king would eventually banish him, but he's hung on and it makes me wonder whether or not Trump is a little bit more wily than his ego suggests, right?
I really thought when Bobby criticized his diet, that would be it.
But it was like the next day he was recommended for Health and Human Services.
So yeah, there's something going on there.
But Elon, I don't think is going to hang on as long.
But what interested me was the responses by Maha Stans, who went to great lengths to justify this photo.
Some people said, he's not going to eat it.
A few people said it's an AI photo, even after major news organizations, and Don Jr. himself shared it.
Dave Asprey, Bulletproof founder, also posted the photo, and he claimed that Bobby's fixing the system from the inside.
Well, that's by transmuting the food within his body and then depositing his turds in some special place that will circulate throughout the entire Congress.
Yeah, he's gonna do like a microorganism fecal transplant.
Yeah, awesome.
My favorite was when Asprey said, you know, it's really hard to find food when you're on the road.
We've all been there.
Because this exasperating trip from Mar-a-Lago to Madison Square Garden in New York City to watch a UFC fight with a group of millionaires and billionaires is definitely a challenge in those food deserts.
- Yeah, as if they can't have anything delivered to them at any moment by any supermodel on the planet, like whale heads, low mercury, dolphin skewers, whatever you want, A1 greens to wash them down.
But I think what's happening here actually is a ritual that McDonald's is the Trump ritual food, it's the communion.
You really can't bring your own kimchi.
- Yeah, when in Rome. - Matthew, it's AG1, not A1 greens.
Can we please get this right? - They rebranded.
- Okay, all right.
Do you need me to do that again?
So all those comments got me thinking about echo chambers and algorithms, the varied response from the same photo on our own conspirituality feed compared to Asprey's, for example.
Though to be fair, I did see a number of angry and confused people on Asprey's feed as well.
But then yesterday, I came across a new Pew report on America's news influencers that, while it's not really surprising, it puts a lot of this into perspective.
And the overall finding of the report is that the majority of news influencers on social media sites are men, and they tend to lean conservative politically.
Now, the data from this research is notable because of conservative media's constant screaming about being censored, and that the mainstream media and the left is always trying to silence them.
If we look...
Six of the top podcasts in America as of this week are Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Theo Vaughn, Charlie Kirk, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens.
So you have four men, two women, but all conservative.
And I'm not here to dictate listening habits, but again, as with Bobby, the hypocrisy here on the right is thick.
And I wish people would own up to the fact that podcasts are the mainstream media at this point, and no conservative media, you are not being silenced.
So here's a few tidbits from the Pew report that really jumped out to me.
About one in five Americans, including a much higher share of adults under 30, say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.
And the adults under 30, it's 37% of them.
Far more of the news influencers in the study have an account on X than any other social media site.
27% of news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative, or pro-Donald Trump, while only 21% identify as Democrats or liberal.
The only site where more news influencers identify being left of center is TikTok.
A clear majority, as I said, are men, but that's 63%.
And women don't even make up a third because then you have non-binary podcasters and influencers as well.
So it's really male-driven.
And then most, this is 77%, have no affiliation or background with any news organization whatsoever, but they are considered news influencers.
Now, it's also interesting to note that majorities of people who get their news from social media get their basic facts, that's 90%, opinions, 87%, and breaking news, 83%, on social media.
When this goes back to the dissonance that many probably felt seeing Bobby eating McDonald's on the plane, if you really think that he is a beacon of health, there's no way you're going to believe that's a real photo or that he really ate it.
And with conservative men predominantly running the show on social media right now when it comes to news, we're in for a lot more collective dissonance in the years to come.
You know, in thinking about TWIC this week, I just kept drawing a blank.
There is plenty of data.
There are plenty of stories.
There's a whole new genre of election denial, conspiracism erupting on social media amongst liberals who cannot conceive why Harris wasn't more enthusiastically supported.
It just keeps flowing and somehow it is either floating past me or it's beyond me.
It's very hard to connect with anything solid.
I think this is called depression.
And then watching the cabinet picks roll out just flat lined me even more.
I was listening to Decoding the Gurus, and over there they were calling it the clown car.
But I think that that's very 2016, actually, because this time around it really is blitzkrieg.
Super insane and aggressive ideologues just totally hopped up on the crystal meth of their own accelerationism.
They'll be rewarded for their speed.
But then I did find a story out of North Carolina, and there's a guy named Benjamin Fuller who went on TikTok, and he said that he found a Bible stuck on a metal post outside of a house that had been completely submerged by Hurricane Helene.
Now, his camera zooms up on it as he's narrating the scene, and it shows that it's open to Revelations chapters 14 and 15, which detail apocalyptic prophecies.
This is the vision of the Lamb with the 144,000 on Mount Zion, the angels warning about coming doom, plagues clearing the earth and leaving the righteous hovering above the burning sea of glass.
So, Benjamin is saying that God left a message about why he was killing people with hurricanes.
So, you go to look up Benjamin Fuller, and you'll see that he owns an online shop called The Millstone, which might be a reference to the famous evangelical image of retribution and atonement for sins.
This is Jesus saying in Matthew 18.6,"...if anyone causes one of these little ones, those who believe in me, to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." So, what does the shop sell?
Well, firing range targets and beard oil.
And honestly, actually the beards might be the millstone, I don't know.
But one of the blends he makes is called toxic masculinity.
That goes in your beard and the ad copy says, our original signature blend, careful now, we don't want to make too much of a man out of you.
mega anthems up on his TikTok feed.
So do I really want to dig into this deeper and find out if he, you know, set that Bible up like a prop on that post for a photo shoot?
Not really.
I did wonder if there was another post in North Carolina somewhere where a soggy copy of a recent IPCC report on sea ice melt is hanging out like a wet rag.
So I don't know whether Fuller is on the level here, or he's creating a scene to console himself with the notion that the flooding is part of a divine plan to cleanse the world of wokeness instead of a predictable outcome of the climate change his party won't do anything about.
Mostly, I'm really sad at this sort of across the board childlike reactive impulse within a lot of us, I think, to bypass reality with simplicities that massage confirmation bias.
So, on a structural level, this is what I mean by, like, you know, many of us.
And please note that I'm saying structural.
I don't see a lot of difference between Fuller misattributing the hurricane to God instead of climate, and liberal pundits misattributing the electoral disaster to wokeism, and not more obvious material causes like genocide or offering almost nothing to change wealth inequality.
That's a really interesting comparison.
So, structurally...
God here and the unpopularity of wokeism is the comparison?
Yeah, two things that are dubious, right?
Two things that you have to believe in.
Two things that you don't have evidence for, or that you know you don't have enough evidence for, that are performing the same function.
They're distracting the people involved from obvious material causes.
So I don't know.
know, it just makes me realize that this blankness I feel, I think it's a kind of grief over how hopeless it seems because there is a deep current of denial running through so many veins of our politics.
All of the denial in my view serves to hide some very basic questions about how we survive late stage capitalism that we all have to work on together.
And it's really daunting.
But, you know, I guess the good thing about grief is that when you know that that's what it is, you also know it passes.
Yeah.
And it's been coming in waves has been my experience.
It's It's up and down and a lot of numbness and blankness, so I'm with you on that.
It's an interesting comparison.
I would say that, unfortunately, your comparison to Wookism, there have been some really good pieces about this of saying how I agree with that comparison,
but there's an entire media apparatus that has God on its side, whereas they're also confusing the issue around wokeism.
So, in that sense, the right really does drive the conversation in all of these categories at the moment.
And that, I think, is the biggest challenge that we have to overcome.
And I've seen a lot of people talking about how do we create a new media environment to counter it.
And I think we're trying our best to do what we can, but it's a very David versus Goliath situation.
Situation we're faced with right now, considering all the money, as you'll get to in your great interview later, Julian, that we're facing.
So it's going to be pushing that boulder up the hill for a while for us.
Yeah, and we talked a little bit last week about wokeness and how the Trump campaign really effectively leveraged certain culture war issues as if they were the platform of the Harris campaign, when in fact they really weren't.
But later on, I thought about it too, and I was like, well, it In one way, it shows that some of the least popular expressions of social justice culture over the last 10 years are so unpopular that even if your opponent is not espousing them as their platform, you can paint them with that and, you know, make people want to run the other way.
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Our main story today is about Gareth Gore's book on Opus Dei.
This is a wealthy and influential high-demand Catholic group that was founded in the 1920s by a priest who claimed to be directed by visions from God.
According to Gore, Opus Dei has been accused by former members of deceptive recruitment techniques and exerting control by misusing confidential information shared in required weekly confession-like spiritual counseling sessions.
The core group of members, who are called numeres, live in sex-segregated residential centers, and despite not being priests, take vows of poverty, obedience, and celibacy, and are strongly encouraged to engage in ritual self-whipping and other mortifications of the flesh.
New legal findings in Argentina allege that the female menial staff have for decades been recruited to Often as miners from poor villages there in Argentina and in other countries and then trafficked around the world as a form of slave labor.
Meanwhile each successive Opus Dei leader has lived in an opulent palace at the heart of their headquarters in Rome.
The organization built enormous institutional wealth and influence by targeting elite members of society to become what are called super Numeries, a different category.
They're subject to less strict rules and they still live at home.
As I read the book, I was fascinated by how the early days of Opus Dei intersected with the chaos of the Spanish Civil War and would end up becoming ensconced, the organization would, in the regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
This parallels with today's America.
With Donald Trump now entering a second term and the influence Opus Dei has over some of the new administration's top allies.
For example, Leonard Leo, architect of the current SCOTUS supermajority, not of evangelical Christians but of conservative Catholics, has all six of his kids in Opus Dei schools.
And in 2022, Leo was honored with the John Paul II New Evangelization Award by the Opus Dei Run Catholic Information Center in D.C. Heritage Foundation leader and central figure in the creation of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, receives weekly spiritual guidance at that same center and once delivered a passionate speech there on how inspired he is by their founder's vision.
America's next Vice President, J.D. Vance, is close friends with Roberts and wrote the foreword to his recent book.
Our interview starts with some history on Opus Dei and then transitions into why they're relevant in the U.S. today.
We'll run the interview soon, Julian, and it was really good and brought up a lot for me, but I just want to briefly point out two things.
First off, I think it's kind of funny how the right has become the perceived party of health, and then hearing the way that these religious mortify themselves, their flesh, and the abuse that they do to themselves— Now, obviously, these are not MAHA stands, so it's not the same crew exactly, but it is pretty disconcerting to hear what they're actually doing to themselves.
So listeners, you'll hear that soon.
I also want to point out, though, because he kind of passes over something that I think is really important about how organizations like the Heritage Foundation use nonprofits as sort of leverage and a sort of cover of I remember when I lived in New York City, I would go to an African dance show at BAM, for example.
And in the beginning, you're sponsored by Bank of America and David Koch.
And then I would go to Lincoln Center, and there's actually a building there named after David Koch.
And it turns out that David Koch actually truly, really loved the arts.
He put a lot of money into it.
But at the same time, Conservative organizations regularly do, and to be fair, a lot of big corporations do this, but they give money to nonprofits, first of all, for the tax break, which is a no-brainer for them.
But secondly, it gives them an opportunity to say, hey, we're nonpartisan.
We're giving freely to all these different charitable organizations.
And that can come with a lot of strings attached to Heritage Foundation's nonprofit, Stand Together, specifically focuses on left-leaning and liberal nonprofits, for example.
And some of them are doing really good work in recidivism, in training women to be construction workers, in trying to improve quality of life in prisons.
And these are all really good organizations.
But So you'll often hear a lot of talk about things like You shouldn't look for top-down solutions.
And it's really an attempt to say, hey, we need to deregulate as much as possible.
And so I just think it's really important for listeners when they hear about specifically conservative religious organizations that seem to be funding good things is that those strings are often attached and they use it for cover for their longer-term goals.
Which usually have to do with taking away women's bodily autonomy or deregulating all the agencies that protect us out of existence.
Yeah, I'm not so sure there's that much daylight between the mortifications and Opus Dei and some of the things that we see in the wellness world or in the Maha world.
I mean, Aubrey Marcus goes into a no-light, complete-darkness retreat for 10 days.
There are people who are doing ice baths on the daily.
There are people who are doing all kinds of painful physical exercises.
Yeah, and all kinds of...
Very interesting, weird things that are extreme.
Purgations.
There's a lot of overlap there, and I think it speaks to both the romanticism of ancient modes of purification, but also the sort of zero-sum game of realizing that if you don't actually have purification,
You know, public health-oriented, evidence-based medicine within your trust sphere, you're really going to have to figure out how to completely defeat death within your own body.
And you're going to go to extreme measures to do that.
And yeah, so I think I see some overlap there.
I definitely see overlap.
And you can use ayahuasca as an example because that's across the board.
But within that community of something called Kembo, which is taking frog poison, slicing open your skin and dabbing it into your arm or wherever you happen to put it.
And it's supposed to be a detox for your liver.
Of course, all that's bullshit.
It doesn't actually do that.
But the pain is good and purifying idea definitely cuts across political and religious lines.
Yeah, there's a purgative, there's a cleansing price that you pay then for the wisdom and the insight that comes from the psychedelic substance, when really all that it is is that the psychedelic substance is wrapped up in all these things that are toxic to your body.
And one of the things that we don't really know, we don't get clarity on from Gore's book, he doesn't go into this reporting, because I don't think he interviews anybody who's wearing the seliche or the barbed wire, you know, sort of leg garter that people are wearing.
Yeah.
That some people are wearing for two hours every day is whether that's done in private or whether it's done while you are maintaining a sense of mission urgency while you're out in the world doing your thing, you know?
I'll say a little bit more about that later because there are some questions that come up with regard to what we start imagining about these people, right?
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
You know, Derek, I wanted to say since Citizens United...
people like Leonard Leo have really, really leveraged this essentially dark money, you could even refer to it as money laundering kind of way of setting up all of these shell companies that you pass money through from donors who don't want to necessarily be associated with the initiatives that you're using the money for.
And Opus Dei has actually done something very, very similar.
Yeah, and that's why I'm glad we're taking a closer look at it, because I think Gore has uncovered some good numbers, money stuff about the organization.
And, you know, all of that stuff tracks, in my experience, quite, you know, closely with the famously Byzantine financials of Catholic organizations around the world from time out of mind, because, you know, this is the universal church.
There are spiritual and financial incentives to thinking that borders and national tax laws and other worldly things aren't that important.
But what I found most interesting walking away from the interview, and then I scoured the e-book because I had some particular questions, is the question Gore raises about how Opus Dei blurs the lines between a cultic organization and the enormous church it locates itself within and draws its power from.
And that involves the difference between devotion and coercion and how strong those boundaries are to begin with.
And I think it's a useful set of questions, because when we're thinking about other micro-macro scenarios, the same stuff comes up, like how many disparate groups bend the knee to MAGA? How centralized is it?
What does it take to cohere them all together?
And will J.D. Vance be able to do it when Trump carks it?
From Gore's account, the alleged abuses in Opus Dei are microcosmic to the abuses that are known in the broader church.
And I think his work also demonstrates the very common difficulties that journalists have when sourcing institutional abuse investigations.
Not a lot of people are willing to come forward.
When you say microcosmic, is that largely a function of the fact that it's a lot smaller than the massiveness and the legacy of the Catholic Church?
Yeah.
It looks like the way that Opus Dei is managing its abuse reality and its scandals and its PR is just sort of microcosmic to what the rest of the Church has always done or has done for the last 40 years.
It's not really a new story.
I think the focus and the sort of placement of the group within Washington and other political centers of power is really interesting.
I mean, the level of control exerted over especially the numeraries sounds different to me than what we see in the Catholic Church.
Well, yes, and he interviews an unnamed source who describes being in a group of boys who were sexually abused by a numerary when they were teenagers.
He cites a court case implicated in that or on that point, but he doesn't footnote the docket.
He shows that if...
Yeah.
who describes a numerary sexually abusing him as a child.
Now, these survivors both say that the abuse was known and overlooked by the hierarchy, but this is also the story of the modern Catholic Church.
Yeah.
Now, Gore also relies heavily on a much more damning, but also a singular source.
And this is a Spanish former member named Maria del Carmen Tapia, who offers a lot of insider details about the alleged controlling paranoia of Escrivá, who she knew quite well.
This is things like claiming that he installed microphones in the numeraries' houses so that he could track their conversations.
This is back in the 1960s.
But I also think Gore brings up good questions about how much direct ideological control Opus Dei exerts over their members.
He comes down on the side of a lot, and I think that's something to keep in mind as we think of how JD Vance and Kevin Roberts and all those guys seem to be able to sleep at night.
His focal points of undue influence are basically, you know, he talks about Escrivá's totalizing charisma and lasting memory.
Like, he's still a saint that haunts every room.
The limiting of information to the group and all of these advices and rules around what kind of media they're supposed to consume or not.
Then there's the group ambition to influence powerful people, and then the centrality of money tycoons in the community, which is where Gore starts his story with Banco Popular in Spain.
And then there's also this matter of inculcating an obsession with self-discipline.
But I think the most important thing that stood out to me as a Catholic was the usage of confession, or as you said, Julian, confession-like practices to gain leverage over members.
And just to zoom in on that last bit, Gore highlights this interesting practice that Opus Dei encourages on a weekly basis.
It's called the fraternal chat or the confidence.
And the outer members are expected to have to go to the inner members to conduct these conversations in which personal feelings on faith, purity, and vocation, those are the categories that Tapia describes, are discussed.
And Gore reports that these disclosures become a kind of group property that are passed up and down the line of command in discussions of who is worthy of advancement in the organization and who might be flagged as a troublemaker.
So, yeah, spiritual abuse, maybe.
Also, basic management skills for a power organization, maybe too.
I mean, it's management skills, but they're also instructed to talk about their deepest, darkest secrets and ask for help in how to become more exemplary religious figures.
Yes, and the allegation is that those deepest, darkest secrets are then known by the organization, and the implication is made by Gore that that becomes a kind of collateral, i.e.
Keith Raniere or somebody like that, right?
Yes.
Yes, yes.
And he's not alone in that.
There are several sources who have made those allegations in other books.
Right.
What's tricky and potentially creepy is that, you know, this chat practice can look and probably feel an awful lot like confession, which as a sacrament in the Catholic Church is bound by confidentiality.
And that's a privilege that's recognized in a lot of legal jurisdiction.
And that causes its own problems when confessors cover up crimes like clerical sexual abuse.
But according to Gore, it seems like Opus Dei might have created a parallel Scientology-like information gathering mechanism through which it can manipulate members.
So it's all good background on the flavor of this organization that, you know, J.D. Vance, who might be president in six months, is a part of.
But it's important to make clear that Gore didn't find a smoking gun behind the MAGA confessional curtains in the sense that there's no indication that Bill Barr or Kevin Roberts are going for these confidence chats at the Catholic Information Center and are then worried about being blackmailed or even being told specifically what they should be doing in their political lives.
Nor can we know that J.D. Vance is wearing the barbed wire garter belt around his thigh while he's sitting for a Fox interview.
Like, Gorham makes a big deal out of the Opus Dei, you know, I think he thinks dubious claim that the organization is apolitical, and clearly when 100% reactionaries are lining up for communion, you can't seriously claim that.
But I I was left with feeling like there's two directions that the imagination can take a story like this.
First of all, Opus Dei is a coercive cult that members can't leave, that exerts centralized political pressures on its high-value targets, that it works them like puppets towards the full takeover of the cabal.
But Gore isn't saying that, and he isn't showing it.
But people will begin to have that impression as they think and learn more about Opus Dei.
That's just the nature of how a story like this is going to evolve, I think, is that people are going to make it into the worst thing possible.
But the other possibility is that Opus Dei is a super conservative Catholic sect modeled on previous religious orders, but attempting to spread its discipline out into its lay population.
And it promotes high levels of devotion and asceticism, but unequally so that its underclass members are vulnerable to severe exploitation, just like in any other business.
But for its wealthy or celebrity members...
Wait, just like any other business?
Well, yeah.
It's underclass members are vulnerable to severe exploitation.
The service industry.
There's a scale of exploitation.
Sure there is.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So the wealthy and celebrity members may mainly function as a social networking club with added religious grandeur that maybe makes them feel better about what they're up to.
So...
I'll just finish by saying that back when I was a practicing Catholic, I knew Opus Dei people.
I knew they had very austere beliefs and practices.
I knew that if we ever talked politics, it would go very badly.
But I also knew that it was complicated.
And I was just talking with my dad over the weekend.
He was a Catholic high school teacher for 30 years.
He was also a union rep for his staff.
And he had a labor union colleague who had six kids and was full-on opus dei.
But as a union leader, he had to vigorously defend teachers against the church influence board.
So this was a union that promoted the formation of the gay-straight alliances in Catholic schools and had many other progressive agendas.
And so this was a guy who was constantly positioned of undermining the church's financial and sometimes even moral dominance, you know, and this continual downward pressure that was always asking workers to do more for less, and then suddenly justifying that by implying that they were doing spiritual rather than material work.
You know, but this was a generation ago.
And, you know, we know how things have changed.
Like, everything has gotten worse.
I mean, that guy might have been more of a so-called, like, a Kennedy Catholic opus dei guy.
You know, somebody who placed a higher value on separating out his church and public lives, you know.
I don't know about that, but I think it might be like this.
And what is very interesting to Opus Dei to me is that organizations that depend on the broader liberality of an umbrella organization like the church as a shield so that they can plausibly deny their extremism, they also have to risk that individuals can always realize they can retreat back into a less controlling and more diverse church.
And so that barbed wire garter belt, it might bite really hard, but it also might not steer every member's path.
That's not clear to me.
Yeah, and one of the things that listeners will hear in the interview is that Gore does take a moment to say, listen, I'm not saying that there's a cabal back in Rome that is issuing specific directives in terms of what they should instruct Kevin Roberts to do and what they should instruct J.D. Vance to do.
Rather, I'm saying that from the beginning, this is Gore, from the beginning, Opus Dei has functioned as an organization that has sought to exert a reactionary religious influence towards I
mean, in some ways, the softer and more immersive people Well, it will make fewer mistakes, that's for sure.
It doesn't have to be predictive.
It doesn't risk anything.
And it seems from everything I read about Escrivar, he was very canny about keeping his cards close to his chest.
I mean, it sounds like the organization wanted to have influence, but it doesn't really care where that influence comes from.
Right?
Or it wants to go in a conservative direction for sure, but it's going to be careful about who it lays its cards on.
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Gareth Gore is a financial journalist and editor who has written for Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and International Finance Review.
on assignment covering the collapse of spanish bank banco popular gore uncovered the financial syndicate of shell companies that opus day has used for decades to build a global real estate empire and enrich their leaders and allies as he kept digging a history of religious abuse and political influence that runs from franco era spain to today's trumpian america revealed itself
this is my interview with gareth gore about his new book opus the cult of dark money human trafficking and right-wing conspiracy inside the catholic church gareth welcome thank you so much for taking the time to join us on a conspirituality Thank you for having me on, Julian.
And it's a pleasure to be here.
You recently published this utterly compelling book.
It's titled Opus.
It's through Simon & Schuster.
And it's about the ultra-conservative, high-demand, secretive Catholic organization called Opus Dei that started in Spain about 100 years ago.
Today, they hold assets numbering in the billions.
They've been the subject of several scandals and legal cases.
And their influence even reaches into modern American politics.
And we'll get into all of that in a little bit.
But to start with, just tell us what does Opus Dei mean and how do they publicly present themselves to the world?
So Opus Dei literally means the work of God.
So this is an organization that was set up by a Spanish priest by the name of Josemaría Escrivá.
In 1928. And he basically went around telling everyone that he'd received this vision from God, outlining how ordinary Christians, Catholics could better serve God.
And that's what the organisation continues to push.
But beneath that facade, underneath that facade, I guess I should say, there's a kind of hidden underbelly to the movement.
You don't choose to become a member of Opus Dei.
It chooses you.
Right since the beginning, this is an organization that has very specifically targeted the elite, the powerful and the wealthy.
So yeah, so there's this public facade that it presents to you and me and the world of, you know, a simple, benign organisation that just wants to help ordinary Catholics to live out their faith more deeply, when in fact there's a very dark, hidden underbelly to the movement that few people, even many of its members, know anything about.
Today?
The group is estimated to have around 95,000 members worldwide.
But I'm really curious about the structure of the organization, because that is established to some extent early on, and it seems like it continues to this day.
So isn't an organization made up of priests?
What role do women play?
And then there are these terms numerary and supernumerary.
Can you kind of break down how it all works?
So Escrief are, I think, very early on.
Realized that he would need a kind of a roadmap for how the group would operate.
Initially, he began to recruit this kind of inner core of members.
So these Numeri members are people who have effectively given up their lives to Opus A. So they live in gender segregated residences, so all male or all female.
They live these lives of chastity, poverty and obedience.
So initially he started off the movement with this very small group.
And the idea was that he would recruit these young men and young women, and he would, through this system of control and manipulation that he developed, he would effectively control every element of their life.
They wouldn't be allowed to see their families.
Any letters they received or wrote would be read first by the director.
They lived in a very strict timetable of prayer and indoctrination.
He'd train this inner core of elite members.
And they would then be sent off around the world.
And they were trusted.
They were controlled.
They could then build Opus Dei from that.
They were then set on recruiting this wider membership group.
So these supernumeraries.
So the supernumeraries are...
Everyday Catholics.
You know, these are normally married people.
They often have children.
They have everyday jobs.
Well, I say everyday.
They have, you know, they have elite jobs.
So they're politicians.
They're business people.
They're lawyers.
They are journalists.
They're people in positions of influence.
And So you have this group, the numeraries, who live this highly controlled existence, who recruit and effectively kind of work these cells of supernumeraries in cities around the world.
And to come back to what we were saying earlier, faith is used as a front in all of this.
So faith is used as a front first of all to recruit these people, but then it's used as a front to control these people and to gather information.
So the numeraries tell the supernumeraries That as part of their membership, they have to have these continuous spiritual guidance sessions.
So supernumeries are expected to offer up the innermost thoughts and insecurities, the professional travails and desires and everything, the sexual lives.
They're expected to tell the numery spiritual directors everything.
And they think this is all done in confidence, but it's not.
You know, information is collected and relayed up by the numerous to the kind of national leadership of Opus Dei.
And, you know, this information that they gather is used to better control the network and to connect people so that, you know, so that the wider aims and ambitions of Opus Dei can be achieved.
And you asked before about, you know, about priests.
So some of these numery men who've signed up to this ideal, this philosophy, are then kind of given a tap on the shoulder at some point and said, and they're told, now it's your turn to become a priest.
Because they need the priest as part of this kind of control mechanism, you know.
Confession is also used to gather information to pass on to national headquarters.
You know, there are roughly 100,000 members.
90% of them are supernumeraries out in the world doing normal jobs or elite jobs.
About 10% are numery members.
And Of the numeraries, you know, probably about, I don't know, like 10-20% of those, so 1 or 2% of the entire Opus Dei membership are priests.
And yet, that small percentage of priests, in some cases...
Have found their way into very prominent positions within the Catholic establishment.
Is that right?
John Paul II, he was a huge fan of Oprah's Day.
I mean, you might say they groomed him as a young archbishop when he was the archbishop of Krakow.
He would come to Rome and he would be hosted at the Opus Dei headquarters.
Opus Dei financed, I guess, the propagation of his speeches.
They published them in books and spread them around the world.
So they helped to really elevate his status within the church well before he became Pope.
And when he became Pope, he rewarded them by giving Opus Dei this special status, which allowed Opus Dei to operate outside the normal hierarchy of the church.
So Opus Dei, thanks to John Paul II, was given carte blanche to do whatever it wanted anywhere in the world.
And it would only be answerable to the Pope himself.
They didn't have to answer to the local bishop or archbishop.
Whenever they did something that was questionable, whenever they got into trouble, the local archbishop couldn't do anything about it because they were kind of a law unto themselves, basically.
And John Paul II also promoted a number of Opus Dei priests to prominent positions within the Vatican hierarchy as well, within the kind of governance structure of the Vatican.
By the 90s, early 2000s, Opus Dei priests and numeris held pretty important positions in critical parts of the Vatican power structure.
And that's kind of been eroded somewhat in recent years, but certainly in the 2000s, they had their fingers in many pies around the Vatican and across the world.
Woven through all of this, Is this mortification of the flesh piece, which, of course, there's a sensational quality about this that I'm sure everyone asks you about it.
So tell us a little bit about this specific practice.
There's a long history of corporal mortification within the Catholic Church and in other religious groups.
Most movements had got rid of this practice, certainly by the 1920s when Opus Dei was set up.
But Escrivá was a traditionalist, let's say.
So when in the early years of Elber's Day, when he was really struggling to find any members, to recruit anyone, he would really punish himself.
So he would deny himself, you know, basic things like food and water for long periods.
He would use a whip.
You know, he would strip off and he would whip himself on his back, initially with just a rope, kind of a whip with kind of several, I guess, tentacles with just made of rope.
But then to enhance the suffering, occasionally he would attach razor blades.
He would also use this thing called the sillis, which he attached initially around his thigh.
It's kind of a barbed wire.
He would wear it for long periods around his thigh.
And then when that wasn't enough, he would get another larger sillis and attach it around his waist.
He then made corporal modification obligatory.
He kind of framed it as an essential way to identify with the suffering of Christ and to remember, I guess, the suffering of Christ.
The numeraries are expected to use the sillis, this kind of barbed wire around the thigh.
Two hours every single day.
They're also expected to use the discipline, so the whip over the backs once a week as well.
So this is...
Everything in Opus Dei is framed as being voluntary, but it's not.
I mean, it's expected.
And, you know...
The numeraries are asked frequently whether or not they are keeping up with what they call the norms, which are these internal rules, which include corporate modification.
Now, the supernumeraries, the kind of people out in the world, they are encouraged by the numerary handlers to do this practice also.
But, you know, because they live at home, You know, I guess that there's less control.
There are other elements as well.
So numeraries in particular, but also supernumeraries are encouraged to perform additional acts of corporal mortification through the day, which are maybe more simple.
So they're encouraged to, you know, Not have a dessert or to not drink water for the afternoon.
There's a religious element to it and they frame it as reminding yourself of the suffering of Christ.
But it's also about suppressing individuality and about suppressing individual wants and urges so that you can become a cog in this world.
This wheel, a cog in this Opus Dei machine makes you more pliable, I think.
I mean, that's not just my view.
I think that's the view of also some of the numeraries that have left the organization.
But yeah, I mean, it's certainly tied up with suppressing individuality, I think.
So there's another aspect that you haven't touched on yet, which has to do with denying oneself the comfort of sleeping on a bed some of the time.
Yes.
And the reason I wanted to bring it up is that the encouragement or the rules that are sort of suggested are different for men and for women with regard to that practice.
The female Numeri members had to sleep on boards, on these wooden boards.
The men, on the other hand, were allowed to sleep in beds, on mattresses.
Although the men were encouraged once a week to To sleep on the floor to, I guess, you know, as an additional act of corporal mortification.
But the women every single night were expected to sleep on these boards.
Now, I think in the 60s, because this caused all kinds of health issues for the women.
So in the 60s, as a concession, they brought in this new internal rule whereby I think women from the age of 40 were allowed to sleep on mattresses.
But up until the age of 40, you were expected to sleep on these boards.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, and part of the reason why I'm asking you about this is that women have a very particular kind of role within the organization, and that has led to a very big recent lawsuit that's happening in Argentina, I believe.
Opus Dei right from the beginning has sought to recruit the elite, elite supernumeraries.
Right from the beginning, Escrivá realized that in order to recruit elite supernumeraries, you kind of wanted elite numeraries as well, because they were the people they'd be, they would know how to talk to these people, they would be educated, could have the right kinds of conversations, they would hang out in the right social circles.
But very quickly, Escrivá realized that he was spending a lot of money on domestic workers and To cook and clean in the Opus Dei residences that he was running, where the numery members were living, and also in student residences that Opus Dei was operating to recruit the next generation of elite numeries and supernumeries.
And Escrivá in the 40s came up with this brilliant idea of Why don't we create this new subclass of membership called, and they were initially called the Numeri Servants, which kind of, I guess, tells you all you need to know about the kind of role he envisaged for them.
So what they what what Opus Dei did was they began to recruit the women who were cooking and cleaning at the Opus Dei residences around the world.
They went after them.
They recruited them quite successfully.
Now, part of being a numery or numery servant involves if you work outside of Opus Dei, involves giving all of your salary to Opus Dei every every last penny.
So by recruiting the women that were working in the Opus Dei residencies, what they were effectively doing was creating a source of free labour.
You know, I guess in theory, Opus Dei continued paying some of these women, but then the women were expected to give every penny of this money back.
And I guess at some point, they just...
They just ditched paying them entirely so that they were effectively working for free.
Hundreds, thousands of women have been recruited into Opus Dei as these numery servants.
And what Opus Dei does is, what it's done over the years, is Is specifically go after underprivileged girls.
And I can't emphasize that enough.
You know, when Opus Dei recruits, whether it's for a numery or for a numery assistant or numery servant, they generally target these people from very young.
And so what happened...
Was that Alpaste developed this practice of going out to poor villages in places like Argentina or Nigeria, the Philippines.
They went around knocking on doors.
Numeri members went around knocking on doors, often accompanied by an Alpaste priest.
And they were basically looking for girls.
And they would go around and when they found girls, they would say to the families, hey...
You know, around here, there are not a great deal of jobs or opportunities.
Your girls, the schools around here are terrible.
But hey, we're running this school back in the big city.
We're teaching girls like, you know, like yours, how to cook and how to get jobs in the world of hospitality.
Why don't you send your girl back with us?
And we can give her this great education.
We're talking here girls who are like 12, 13, 14 years old.
So the families would agree to this, thinking, well, this is a Catholic organization.
They're accompanied by a priest.
It sounds like they're offering this great service.
And, you know, the girls would be sent off to these schools.
And once these girls were hundreds of miles away from their families with no support network other than the Elber State people that they're living with...
They'd be pushed into joining the movement as numery servants.
And then, you know, once they're in, these girls are then trafficked around the world to wherever the organization needs them.
And, you know, as you rightly point out, recently in Argentina, federal prosecutors there have formally accused Opus Dei of trafficking teenage girls over...
Numerous decades.
And I know from my research that what was happening in Argentina It's not a one-off thing.
You know, I know there were similar what they call hospitality schools run by Opus Dei in many other countries around the world, in places like Belgium, in the Philippines, in Kenya, Nigeria, across the Americas.
And so I think, you know, this could well be a huge scandal.
What we're seeing in Argentina could be the start of something much, much bigger, I think.
I want to transition, Gareth, Welcome back to the relevance of all of this to today's American politics.
Here on the podcast, we've spent a lot of time covering Leonard Leo, who's behind the appointment of all six of the current conservative Catholic Supreme Court justices who are currently reshaping American life.
Leo is also at the center of the corruption scandals involving the court and billionaire GOP donors.
I was struck by how similar the dark money network of nonprofits that Leonard Leo has established, it's so similar to how Opus Dei operates financially.
But tell us more about Leonard Leo and then the Catholic Information Center.
Opus Dei operates an enormous network of non-profit companies, of foundations, and for-profit companies all around the world, which officially have nothing at all to do with the organization, but which in reality have a completely symbiotic relationship with Opus Dei.
Numeries are placed in charge of these foundations and companies and whatever, and these These entities operators kind of pass through for, you know, Opus Dei money to funnel on to whatever, you know, they don't say what they really are.
They have really kind of anodyne sounding names like, you know, the Foundation for Academic Excellence or, you know, stuff like that.
So it's really hard what's going on.
So, yeah, I mean, that's the way that Opus Dei operates.
And yeah, I mean, as you rightly point out, You know, the U.S. over the past 15 years, thanks to the Citizens United ruling, has, you know, these kinds of similar kinds of foundations have really bloomed.
Opus Dei operates about 100 non-profits in the U.S. So it's part of this ecosystem, but the ecosystem is much, much bigger.
And, you know, with the recent election crisis, We've seen a number of these entities that are used to funnel money from dark sources, often from billionaires who don't want their name attached.
And yeah, so to come back to the guy you mentioned, Leonard Leo, Leonard Leo has very much been at the centre of this dark money world, of channelling money from billionaires to affect policy and to affect the shift that we've seen in the Supreme Court.
So Leonard Leo It sits on the board of the main Opus Dei Center in Central Washington.
So, you know, this is a place called the Catholic Information Center, which is a bookshop and chapel that sits on K Street, right in the heart of the lobby industry in Central Washington.
It's just a humble bookshop and a chapel.
Yes, absolutely.
It's nothing more than that.
I mean, there's a plaque inside the lobby of the Catholic Information Centre, a blue plaque, that boasts about how the CIC is the closest tabernacle to the White House, which for me tells you everything about what this place really is.
It's all about proximity to power.
And, you know, the board of the CIC reads like a who's who of the radical conservative elite.
Past and current members include people like Bill Barr, the former attorney general.
Pat Cipollone, who was the White House chief counsel under Donald Trump.
You've got people like Kevin Roberts, you know, who's the president of the Heritage Foundation.
He's a regular at the CIC. He goes there and gets his spiritual direction from Opus Dei priests at the CIC. It's this kind of symbiosis of Faith and politics.
You know, Opus Dei uses faith as a facade, as a means of recruitment, but also as a means of collecting information and of influencing people within its orbit.
So, you know, spiritual direction sessions are used to push members in the right direction so that they might, you know, connect with the right people or start the right initiatives or push a certain policy in the right direction. connect with the right people or start the right initiatives You know, that's what's going on at the CIC.
It's this network of people who are unified by the faith on the one hand, but also unified by the reactionary political agenda.
And it's a place where they meet and where they network and where they're also given, I guess, you know, the spiritual guidance that they get from the CIC and from Opus Dei in general as well.
It's a kind of spiritual justification for the crusade that they're on.
Much of the agenda that they're pushing forward is deeply at odds with the wider Catholic Church and deeply at odds with the way that many people outside of Opus Dei would understand Christianity.
It has nothing to do with love thy neighbour and all that kind of stuff.
It's, you know, these are deeply reactionary, right-wing agendas and Opus Dei's the kind of patting these guys on the back saying, well done guys, you're doing the work of God here. - Yeah, yeah, this is our mission on the planet And really, you're talking about reactionary Catholic Christian nationalism having more and more of a foothold in Washington, D.C.
And you bring up Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, one of the primary kind of authors or main figures associated with Project 2025.
And now, thanks to the lamentable reality of our most recent election, Project 2025 is set to be put in motion.
And at least to some extent, Opus Dei has influence over that process.
Is that right?
Kevin Roberts is the kind of clearest link.
So he's gone on record.
I mean, he gave a speech about a year ago at the CIC where he talked about how he was inspired by José María Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, and where he quoted...
Escrivar had this thing where he basically expected his followers to go out and re-Christianize the world and set fire to the world.
And Kevin Roberts quoted this saying from Escrivar in his speech.
Thanks to a number of very brave numeraries who smuggled out internal documents from Opus Dei that have been kept hidden for close to 100 years, but which recently have been smuggled out.
These documents have been kept hidden from most of the membership, kept hidden from the Vatican even.
But these are the foundational documents.
These were written by Esrivar.
So he quite clearly, he wrote that he saw his membership as being this kind of hidden militia that would infiltrate every part of society, infiltrate the worlds of politics, judiciary, journalism, infiltrate the worlds of politics, judiciary, journalism, business.
business, education.
And he wrote that he kind of basically expected them to use their positions there to, one, gather information about what he called the enemies of Christ.
So again, Opus Dei being this information collecting network.
But two, he committed quite clear that Their role in those positions of influence as members of Opus Dei was to use or abuse their positions to carry out what he called the orders of Christ, which of course would come through him.
So he makes it quite clear in these hidden foundational documents, these secret documents, that Opus Dei The fundamental driving mission of Opus Dei is to re-Christianize the world.
It's a political movement that's interested in pushing this deeply reactionary and ultra-traditionalist version of society.
It seems like Opus Dei and the people they have influence over, they're in an incredible position to Influence and enact the agenda that they want, and Project 2025 seems to be in line with that.
What about J.D. Vance?
I am aware that J.D. Vance is a fairly recently converted Catholic.
Does he have a connection to Opus Dei?
Kevin Roberts is good friends with J.D. Vance and he asked J.D. Vance to write the foreword to his book.
And I guess because Project 2025 became so politically toxic during the election campaign, And was very successfully used by Democrats, I think, to highlight the kinds of things that a Trump administration were trying to push through.
Trump was very keen to distance himself from Project 2025. And I think having J.D. Vance Openly writing the foreword to a book published by the architect of Project 2025 would have been politically inconvenient, let's say.
And so the launch of the book was pushed back and it came out a couple of weeks back, I think.
Actually, maybe it's come out very recently.
A certain ideological alignment between JD Vance and Kevin Roberts and this wider Opus Dei network.
And I think it's important that we do...
It's important to see Opus Dei as that.
I mean, this is...
What the founder of Opus Dei envisioned and what Opus Dei has been very successful in creating in Washington, D.C. is a network of like-minded reactionary individuals who are Kind of unified by their faith, but it's not all about Catholicism.
It's about creating this wider network.
And Project 2025 is quite clear that what they want to do is fire...
Thousands of federal workers because of this belief that these are all progressive, you know, radical progressives who have destroyed society and the rest of it, and replace them with people from this network that Opus Dei has helped to create.
Now, there's no indication here that there's some guy, the head of Opus Dei, sat in Rome deciding who's going to be the next Secretary of Defense or whatever, right?
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that Opus Dei It has very successfully infiltrated not just the conservative Catholic circles of Washington DC, but it goes much beyond that.
Gareth, congratulations on the book.
It's fantastic.
I encourage everyone to read it.
What hope do you have in terms of the impact of the book?
Already since the book has been out, and it's been just a few weeks, I have received a number of messages from not just former members of Opus Dei, but current members of Opus Dei, including priests who thanked me for writing the book and for exposing the deep problems at the heart of the organization
you know problems like you know we touched on earlier the you know the enslavement of young girls the targeting of children the way that numeri members are controlled and manipulated abused the prevalence of mental illness within the numeri ranks and the use of prescription drugs to to hide just how ill some of these people are i do hope opus day will be forced into reform i
I mean, certainly the Pope has made it very clear that he is unhappy with the way that Opus Dei is being run and the way that it operates.
And he's very much put them on notice.
And we're currently in a strange kind of standoff situation.
Opus Dei has been told to go away and rewrite its statutes.
The Pope very clearly wants them to reform themselves.
But I have doubts whether or not Opus Dei is going to be able to reform itself.
I mean, certainly its reaction to my book.
Any other institution, when presented with such egregious examples of abuse, would immediately hold its hands up and say, right, OK, we need to get to the bottom of this.
We're going to commit ourselves to transparency here.
We're going to start up an independent Investigation to get to the bottom of these accusations.
We're going to absolutely root out any abuse.
But that's not been the reaction of Opus Dei.
Opus Dei has instead launched this huge disinformation campaign that's solely directed at seeking to discredit me and the book.
And so I think that the Vatican will be forced to act.
The big question here is...
Is the Pope.
And he's an elderly man.
He's knocking on 90 right now.
He's not in the best of health.
It's quite possible.
I very much hope he lives for a very long time.
But it's quite possible that he's not going to be with us for a huge amount more.
And so the big question is, what comes next?
If the next Pope is...
From the more conservative wing of the church, there's a possibility that Opus Dei gets to live for another day and doesn't have to reform itself.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here next Thursday or maybe on the weekend.
