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Opus by Gareth Gore https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Opus/Gareth-Gore/9781668016145
I sit down with journalist Gareth Gore to dive deep into the shadowy world of Opus Dei, a secretive Catholic organization with a long history of manipulation and control. We talk about his eye-opening book, Opus, which traces the organization’s origins in Franco’s Spain and shows how it’s slowly, but surely, woven its way into the heart of U.S. politics—especially in Washington, D.C.
Opus Dei is often associated with conservative Catholicism, but Gareth explains that their methods go beyond just religious conservatism. We're talking authoritarian strategies aimed at gaining power by targeting influential people to push their agenda of re-Christianizing society. It’s a heavy topic, but incredibly relevant when you consider their rise during the 1980s under Pope John Paul II and the fact that they're still impacting American politics today, with major players like Leonard Leo and Kevin Roberts on board.
We also explore how Opus Dei isn’t just resisting democratic norms—they're actively trying to reshape society and the Church to fit their vision of control. This conversation is a real eye-opener, revealing the organization's lasting and dangerous influence on both religion and politics.
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you Opus Dei. It's a Catholic order that many people have heard of.
Maybe you remember it from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.
Maybe you watched the film with Tom Hanks that depicted an Opus Dei priest as the villain.
Regardless of your understanding of Opus Dei, there's no way you understand the full story.
Today I speak with journalist Gareth Gore about his new book, Opus, a magisterial work on the history and present of Opus Dei.
One of the most alarming aspects of the story is the end.
It's the way that Opus Dei has infiltrated its way into not only the United States, but Washington, D.C. has become a powerful force among our country's power brokers.
Politicians, spies, elected officials, and others.
Opus Dei was born in Spain under the regime of Franco.
It had from the beginning an authoritarian power structure.
It is secretive. It uses manipulative tactics to re-Christianize society at any cost.
And as you'll hear today, it's made its way to Washington, D.C. and is influential in the life of people like Kevin Roberts, leader of the Heritage Foundation, publisher of Project 2025.
If you're a premium subscriber, stick around.
We have an extra 20 to 25 minutes with Gareth talking about all of those connections.
This is an eye-opening work, and it's an eye-opening interview.
I'm Brad Onishi and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Gareth, first of all, thank you for joining me and thank you for writing this book.
It's one of those books, as you're reading it, you're thinking, how can this have not been written already because it's something of such interest and of such relevance, and yet here we are with your very definitive history of Opus Dei.
You are experienced by training a kind of financial reporter.
How did you find your way into spending six years looking into a secretive Catholic institution that has imposing positions on politics worldwide?
I mean, I fell into this completely by accident.
I had zero plan and zero interest in writing a book about Popper Stay.
And I have to admit that at various points through that kind of five, six-year process, I was thinking, what the hell am I doing with the show of my life?
And if, and this is a big ish, if I ever write another book again, I think I want to write something else.
And I was removed from this world as possible.
But yeah, I mean... As you were kind of hinting at, I mean, so basically I'm a financial reporter.
I've been writing about finance for the past 20 years.
I've written about a really broad range of stuff.
But basically everything I've done is like, follow the money.
And I know it's a bit of a cliche, but it's a great way to really understand any organization, including a religious organization.
And I think having a grounding as a financial journalist has put me in really good stead to take a very different approach to this story.
If a religious scholar like yourself or a political journalist or whoever had come to this story, they would have approached it from a very different prism.
And I'm sure they would have found out a whole bunch of stuff and probably would have found out stuff that I have yet to find out.
But I think coming at it through my kind of prism was a kind of, yeah, a very interesting experience and opened a lot of doors that I think would have been mentioned.
I mean, this is a...
Conspiracy that was basically lying in plain sight.
This was a bank, a high street bank in Spain, where millions of ordinary Spaniards had just deposited their savings or had their current accounts or had their mortgages.
Who knew that this bank was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to this crazy religious organization?
Yeah, it's a crazy story.
So we have this situation where a financial crisis hits, and it's one of those things where I think like the pandemic, these kinds of crises open up cracks and they open up fissures in our worlds.
And it allows you to somehow find your way into one of those cracks and peel behind the curtain Of Opus Dei.
And as you say, there is this Spanish bank, and I'm not going to ruin the whole story because people need to go buy this book, that is siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars and so on to Opus Dei.
And it leads you down a rabbit hole you've been on six years.
So let's start here. Opus Dei is something I think so many people have heard of.
They've seen a Tom Hanks movie from about 15 years ago that had an Opus Dei character.
They've read the Dan Brown novels, whatever.
It seems to be that thing that people know is bad, know is insidious, know is menacing, but they really know very little about.
Where does Opus Dei begin, and who is its sort of very infamous originator?
So, I have to admit, when I came into this story, I'd never read the Divinci Code or seen the film.
So, I mean, obviously I was aware of the whole phenomenon, but I'd never...
Although, of course, I had to read the book, not with the book, and watch the film as part of my research.
And actually, the release of the Da Vinci Code book and film feature in the book, there's a kind of an interesting episode where I talk about Opus Dei's own reaction to that and how they very successfully kind of twisted the narrative to their benefit.
Anyway, that's an aside.
So what is Opus Dei?
I mean, okay. So, Robster was founded by this Spanish priest in 1928, after he supposedly received this vision from God for how, basically outlining how ordinary Catholics could live out their faith more seriously without having to become a priest or a nun.
So they could, basically the idea was, you could, being a doctor or a teacher or being a stay-at-home mum or whatever, By offering everything you give up to God, by striving for perfection in everything you do, you can basically, that's a way of serving God.
And you know what?
That isn't a bad philosophy.
I mean, as a foundation for a movement, I don't think, very few people could argue with that.
But this vision that he supposedly received very quickly became distorted by events that were happening around him.
So this is Spain in the late 20s, early 30s.
It's a very divided society.
Basically, very briefly what happens is there are elections, a kind of left...
Leaming party wins.
And basically the monarchy is ousted.
And suddenly there's this kind of rush of progressive laws where, you know, basically the poor and the downtrodden are suddenly kind of winning their rights.
And it's kind of the overthrow of this old order.
Without there really being a revolution, it's a democratic revolution, right?
That happens. But what also happens is that the church becomes a bit of a A bit of a kind of lightning rod for a lot of the anger against the old regime.
And so the church and priests in general become targets.
And so Escobar sees what's happening around him and sees how the church has become the symbol of repression.
And he tries to get to this movement that he's He's trying to start up, rapidly becomes a reactionary force to what he sees going on around it.
Very quickly, this kind of very laudable philosophical foundation becomes diluted.
And he starts talking about Opus Dei being a militia of soldiers who were kind of fighting the enemies of Christ.
I think it's very, Opus Dei would hate me describing it in this way, but I think right from the start, Opus Dei already very quickly becomes a political movement.
And we can talk about this later, but the parallels to today and the US especially are very strong.
But yeah, I mean, so it very quickly becomes very political.
And the war happens.
He doesn't have many followers.
And it's only really when Franco wins the war that Opus Dei really starts to take off.
Yeah. So we have this situation where in the wake of a kind of democratic progressive revolution, those who have been left out of society, the poor, the marginalized, those without rights, Are suddenly gaining rights and they see, much in the ways that might have happened in the French Revolution a century prior, they see the Catholic Church as part of the old aristocracy, part of the old world, part of the old monarchy that was holding the masses down.
This is the opposite of something like liberation theology in Latin America where the liberation theology priests would side with the poor and side with those who had been overlooked.
Here we have Jose Maria Escriva leading Opus Dei and trying to inspire laypeople to live out their Catholicism in the world without becoming clergy, without becoming priests, and so on.
Not only does it become a political movement, but I think what's so important for people to understand is the way it is structured as an organization is itself mirroring the kind of authoritarianism and some would call fascism that takes hold in Spain under Franco, the infamous leader there who very much was an ally of Opus Dei.
Would you help us understand the structure?
Like, we get punished. How does that work?
So, right from the beginning, Estrella, the guy who delivered it, was obsessed with control.
And I think a lot of this It came out of the fact that in the first few years after him receiving this vision, he was really very unsuccessful as a recruiter.
He managed to, I think in the first three, four years, he managed to recruit two people, one of whom was his deputy at the church where he was the main priest.
And so someone who perhaps felt unable to resist his boss in jobitures.
And even on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, this is like eight years after he's received his vision.
He has 20 members, but he learns a lot in those early years.
He basically starts to draw a very detailed playbook for recruiting people surreptitiously.
And so he recognizes early on that the most efficient way of recruiting is not by going out and telling everyone about this great new philosophy, It's by very carefully picking people out.
And I mean, I would argue that he's picking out vulnerable people in society.
And he puts together these kind of report cards on potential recruits.
And he basically identifies the weaknesses and the vulnerabilities.
And he goes after them.
He targets them. He cuts them off from their families.
And this becomes...
I mean, he writes this stuff down.
And in the book, we...
very first time these writings of Escalibur and Opus Dei has tried to suppress these
documents for many years and we're publishing these things for the first time.
You can see in Black and White, he writes down how to go after, how to target young
kids, basically, young adults.
So, and during those years, he draws up this methodology for, well, he draws up
the foundations for what we have today.
This kind of this cult movement basically were at least for the core membership.
And we can talk a little bit more about this in a second.
but for many of the members in Opus Dei, their everyday existence is meticulously controlled and manipulated, and they're expected to follow Hundreds of pages of rules.
They're expected to allow the directors to read their correspondence and look into their emails or whatever.
They basically have very little freedom.
Opus Dei likes to talk about freedom, but that's not true.
But yeah, I mean, this is all...
Escribar basically creates this system, this abusive system of control and manipulation.
In the very early years of Opus Dei, He's learning from his failures the entire time.
In many ways, it's impressive.
The way that he's doing this, almost in a vacuum.
I mean, you can't go on the internet or go to the library and look up books on cults and how they work and the efficient ways of recruitment.
He's doing this on his own.
Like I said, in many ways, it's impressive, but it's...
It's dark and it's manipulative.
So there's a focus on targeting certain people in society who are vulnerable, but also people who are vulnerable but also successful.
We want to find those with influence, those who might have political influence, those who especially And I would love for you to talk about this, those who have financial influence, those who have access to money, those who have access to institutions where they might siphon off money or direct money to Opus Dei.
I mean, from the very beginning, he seems to think, if I can find doctors and lawyers and financiers and shipping magnates who are vulnerable to my recruitment and yet successful in their own industries, I can build a kind of secret society based on my authoritarian rules and I can gain enormous power and impact by way of the financial reach of these folks I have indoctrinated into a very oppressive regime of living.
I mean, if I'm a lawyer, I may make $200,000 a year in 2021, but I may give $180,000 of that per year to Opus Dei or I may hand over my entire paycheck And go live in one room in a high-rise in whatever city where I'm a big fancy lawyer because I've devoted myself to this organization.
So am I right about that?
The strategy is the vulnerable but successful and make sure you have access to finances at every turn.
So I mean, absolutely. I mean, so what we've talked about so far are the kind of methods of recruitment.
But I guess we need to understand, so what are the aims of Opus Dei?
And right from the start, as we were saying, Escribas saw this as a political movement.
What he envisaged was a way to re-Christianize society.
I mean, we could spend a whole day kind of unpackaging that.
Was the world ever Christianized?
But anyway, we leave that aside for the moment.
But he basically...
What he envisioned was basically a theocracy, a society based on a very conservative reading of the Bible.
And how could he bring that about?
It was by basically attracting the elite to all this day, the people who are in positions of power or the people who tomorrow will be in positions of power.
So very early He was targeting university students, best universities in Spain, because he knew that would be tomorrow's elite.
Those would be tomorrow's political leaders, tomorrow's lawyers, tomorrow's academics.
And so those are the people he wanted to target.
And as you mentioned, Another side of that coin, another side of targeting the elite is the financial benefits of that as well.
So these are the people who are going to be earning well.
And so not only are you going to have a membership that is in a position to influence the way society looks and to use its power, But also that membership is going to be wealthy and will be able to feed its money back into the movement so the movement can continue to account.
But he took that to the extreme.
I mean, basically, members, certainly through the 40s and 50s, and Possibly to today, we're basically encouraged to go to whatever means necessary in order to extract a little bit of extra cash from our jobs or to use the networks and influence in order to accumulate even more power and even more money for Opus Dei.
And we saw, I mean, the most kind of blatant example is the example of this Spanish bank where a group of Numeri and supernumeri members, and I can maybe explain a bit about what that means in a second, basically hijacked the bank in the 1950s by using a piece of compromise they'd managed to find out about the German.
It's kind of funny because they'd kind of found this bit of compromise out.
Through one of its members who kind of confessed this thing in their spiritual direction, and that information was passed and relayed through the movement.
But yeah, it kind of shows the lengths that members will go to.
A couple things. So, A, how did they hijack the bank?
They used someone's, essentially, confession to blackmail important people, and this is the way to re-Christianize society.
So, if you read the book, friends, You're going to find out over and over again, Opus Dei is going to use tactics like this kind of pressure, this kind of potential public embarrassment.
They're going to lean on you and your secrets, lean on you and your downfall as a bank leader or someone else in order to get what they want, which is, quote unquote, to re-Christianize society.
Before we go further in the history, though, I just want to point out something, and I'd love for your feedback on this.
From the beginning, this is an authoritarian movement to re-Christianize society through strict gender roles, hierarchies, and devotion to a very narrow understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
Two things seem to be the enemy of Opus Dei structurally, no matter where it is.
Could be 1930 Spain, could be 2020 United States, could be the UK, it does not matter.
And that is democracy and elections.
They want to pick out influential people that will rule the world.
They don't want to influence the masses in order to win a majority.
So that's one. And then two, a church, a Catholic church, that in the 30s, but really by the 50s and 60s, Is taking a stance in the world that says, we're not here to build a theocracy, but we're going to be a church that recognizes there are other faiths.
We're going to open our doors to the world.
We're going to be a more inviting institution.
And Opus Dei rages against both democracy and a Catholic church that is more modern and open.
And to me, that is the key to understanding why it does everything it does.
It doesn't want democracy or rule by majority, and it doesn't want a Catholic church that's more modern or open.
In fact, it wants the opposite.
How do you see that? Just very briefly to come back to what we were just saying about...
At the top of your comments there, I mean, you were talking about it to the lengths that they will go to.
I mean, Eskeniva himself actually had terms for this way of thinking about setting aside your moral or ethical qualms and kind of anything goes, basically, philosophy.
He had these terms. He called it holy ruthlessness.
And another term he used was holy intransigence.
Basically... I mean, absolutely. Opus Dei has never sought to basically convince the masses of its philosophy.
I think it's very telling that Unlike the rest of the Catholic Church, you can walk into any church, any Catholic Church in the world and say, hey, I'm kind of interested in this whole thing.
How do I become a member?
Like, what do I need to do?
Can you tell me about it?
In Upper Stair, that's not the way it works.
You can't go onto the Upper Stair website and punch in your details and then someone will call you and tell you how you're going to become a member.
They decide who becomes the member.
They go after people, they target them.
They have a very specific type of person that they want to attract.
They've got no interest in the general population and in convincing people that this is the best way for society.
The re-Christianization of society is the thing we should always buy it because whatever.
No. They pick the people in positions of power, they draw them in as members, and then they want to use them as vehicles to basically push through their agenda with absolute disregard for what everyone else thinks.
And I think, again, we can talk about this in a little while, but I mean, the parallels with the current election and especially things like Project 2025, Which, by the way, is basically headed up by a guy that receives his spiritual inflammation from Opus Dei.
Yeah. The parallels are...
Mind-boggling, right?
I mean, like, Project 2025 is a way of pushing through a radical agenda without a democratic mandate.
Yes, the vehicle for doing this would be a Trump victory, but the elimination of almost the totality of the federal employee system and the rest of it in order to, like, put the people that they want in the right places, it's completely anti-democratic.
Escriva and Opus Dei have been espousing for decades, for close to a century.
I want to come to Project 2025 because one of the things I've been, you know, folks
listen to this show, they know for three months I've basically been on a tear of Project 2025
is a radical reactionary Catholic vision.
That is how you should read it.
JD Vance is a radical reactionary Catholic choice for vice president and that's how you
should read him.
And so I want to get to that real quick though.
Okay.
Just to sum it up.
If you are Opus Dei, you're founded by an authoritarian leader whose best ally in the early days of the organization was Franco, a fellow authoritarian slash fascist, however you want to call Franco.
And he is really one who helped Opus Dei in years when it was fledgling, when it was obscure, when it was struggling financially.
We go then to the 1980s.
And this to me is a really important part of a time in Opus Dei.
And I just want to set the setting a little bit.
It's a moment where the UK and the United States are enduring really conservative governments.
These are the Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan years.
It's a time when people really consider there to be conservative economic policies taking hold in important Western countries.
However, it's also a time of this country, many of them, through their support behind migrants from Guatemala, from El Salvador, because of violence in those places, my point is, there was a leftward movement in the United States on the part of the Catholic Church to look out for the disenfranchised.
And yet, in the 1980s, at the very moment when Open State sort of makes its way to the United States in its kind of first wave, Opus Dei really represents a counter to that leftward migrant welcoming neighbor radical hospitality theology.
And it does so through sponsorship from the Pope himself, John Paul II. So there's a lot there.
I apologize. I just teed up a whole bunch of threads.
But would you just help us understand how in the 1980s, Opus Dei gets a boost through an unexpected Pope in John Paul II? Absolutely.
Look, I mean, through the 60s and 70s, Opus Dei had a very difficult relationship with the Patican.
First under John XXIII and then under Paul VI. Paul VI, for a long time, refused to meet with Escribá.
And Escribá... At least one, perhaps more, scathing letters to the Pope, criticizing the Pope.
At one stage, the Pope actually considered kind of intervening in Opus Dei because there were all these suspicions about Opus Dei undermining papal authority.
There was all these rumors about them spying or using the network of members to spy on what was going on really in the Vatican.
But things really changed in the fall of 1978.
So the death of Paul VI, of course, there was a conclave to elect his successor.
Paul VI was only Pope for a short time, right?
Sorry, John Paul I was only Pope...
Oh, I'm sorry. John Paul I was...
Yes. Sorry. So when Paul VI died, all of the cardinals convened on Rome, and Boitiwa, of course, was one of them, the future John Paul II. And during the conflict to elect the successor to Paul VI, he went to visit his old friends at Opus Dei.
So Opus Dei, the future John Paul II and Opus Dei had a very close relationship.
Opus Dei had sponsored a number of initiatives by the future pope, and he saw them as a group of fellow conservatives.
And during the conclave to elect the successor to Paul VI, he went to the Opus Dei headquarters in Rome, and he went there to pray beside the tomb of José María Escrivá.
John Paul I was elected, but he lasted like less than a month.
He had this huge war attack, was found dead in his bed.
All the cardinal had brought back, and suddenly this Polish much bishop Who hadn't received a single vote at the first conclave a few weeks earlier.
Suddenly, I think it was the seventh round of voting.
They can't decide on what to do.
The Vatican establishment is shaken by the events in the past few weeks.
The death of two popes in just a few weeks?
What's God trying to tell us?
Like, this is crazy. And so the several rounds of voting, eventually they settled on this compromised candidate, this Polish archbishop that few people know much about, but which Opus Dei know a lot about because they've been cultivating this relationship for many years.
One of his first acts is he invites in the new leader of Opus Dei and he says almost immediately, this isn't a papal audience.
This is a family reunion.
And Opus Dei for years has been, he said, it's had a very difficult relationship with the Vatican.
It's been basically, it's been wanting to change its status.
It wanted an elevation in status for many years.
It kind of, and has very unsuccessfully lobbied the Vatican for this.
John Paul II grants it this emulation status very quickly.
And I think it's very interesting because what you were just saying about the 70s and 80s are a very interesting time in the history of the Catholic Church.
We've just had the Second Vatican Council.
There's a liberalization feeling in the church, and people are feeling more open to new ideas and new ways of doing things.
Escobar is horrified by this, as is John Paul II. I think John Paul II comes to power.
He's not very well plugged into Vatican circles at all.
He knows that the church is divided, and he knows, especially in places like the United States, there are many, many, many left-leaning bishops who completely disagree with his worldview.
And so he sees Albus Dei as a group of fellow conservatives, and he grants them this new status.
He grants them the status of what they call personal prelature.
Which basically removes Opus Dei from the normal hierarchy of the church.
Opus Dei, he basically allows Opus Dei to operate anywhere they choose in the world.
And critically, above the oversight, like, without having the oversight of the local diocese or archdiocese.
So basically, they can operate independently wherever they want to in the world, and they don't have to answer to the local archbishop.
So for John Paul II, Opus Dei is kind of a critical force to these kind of liberal tendencies that are starting to kind of grow and feel comfortable kind of raising their voices.
And that's in the US especially when the movement really starts to take off because what it does is First of all, it's been given this super legitimacy from the Pope.
It's suddenly got this special status within the church.
And at the same time, it's able to appeal to those conservative American Catholics who feel that the bishops and archbishops in the country aren't perhaps representing their voices.
So Opus Dei spots an opportunity to take advantage of a divided Catholic church and does it very successfully.
This may be an overreach, and these are my words, not yours.
But as I was reading the book, I was thinking of the 1980s and the status given to Opus Dei as a kind of global prelature that answers to no one within the hierarchy of the church, really, except for the Pope, as almost a stranger in radical hospitality for the migrants who are fleeing violence in El Salvador.
And here is this force swooping in from nowhere, answering not to the bishop, the archbishop,
answering not to the cardinal, answering not to the local priesthood,
nobody saying in fact that is not what it means to be a Catholic,
that is not what the church represents, and you should come over here and actually listen to us
tell you our very narrow vision of re-Christianizing society.
So I guess for me, this part of the story has to be told because it is when Opus Dei can really become Opus Dei.
It can become a global phenomenon with little oversight within the grand hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
And it can do what it's doing across the world.
And it really does bring us to the United States.
So friends, you might have listened for half an hour and thought, hey, this is interesting.
What does it have to do with me and my life?
Well, buckle up.
So one of the figures I'll just jump to, there's others we can start with.
There are other people in the United States that we could touch upon, but would you help us get into Opus Dei in the United States through the figure of Father John and the CIC right in the middle of Washington, D.C.? Yes, so Father C. John McCloskey, or Father C. John as he was known to his flock in Washington.
So this is a guy that joined Opus Dei.
And I guess this is a slight diversion, but many people join up today of these things called numeri.
These are people who basically dedicate their lives to the movement.
They become lay celibate members, so they take vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience to the wider movement.
And initially, the philosophy of all this day is that you're able to, you're best able to serve God.
Well, it's a way of serving God through your lay profession.
And so the idea is that even as a numery, you carry on being a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer or whatever it is.
And for this, well...
Steve John McCloskey starts as a stockbroker in New York.
He's working for Merrill Lynch.
And I like to think that a lot of the tactics that later make him such a great converter of this day, he learns, I guess, on the trading floor in Merrill Lynch because he's sat there, cold calling clients.
Giving him the spiel about why they ought to buy these bonds or why they ought to buy this stock, this stock that the bank is trying to offload.
And I'm certain that's the tactics that he learned on the training for Merrill Lynch became very useful later on when he was trying to recruit from the great and the good of Washington, D.C. But as happens in many cases with Lumerys in August A, at one point, August A decides that It's more useful for the organization if you either just perhaps leave your job or maybe sometimes become a priest.
So at one stage in the late 70s, McCloskey basically gets a message from Rome saying, we think you should become a priest.
You need to come to Rome. You're going to be trained as a Roman woman.
He's then sent to Spain to train at the Elpo State College there.
And he comes back to America and first he's posted to Princeton.
He's targeting tomorrow's elite.
But students at Princeton...
I mean, he really rubs the whole student population up the wrong way.
He's coming out with all kinds of crazy statements about...
I go into it much...
Women, right? Railing against feminists and others.
I mean, and it's not like Princeton is known to be this...
Princeton is not like Berkeley or Santa Cruz.
Like, Princeton is a pretty conservative campus.
And even then, it was like, get this guy out of here.
He's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah.
And so eventually he's booted out because the university authorities are like, who is this guy?
You can't go around saying that kind of stuff.
I'm sorry, mate. You need to leave.
And so fast forward to 98, she is chosen to basically become the new chaplain for a place called the Catholic Information Center.
Which is a bookshop and chapel in the center of Washington, D.C. that Opus Dei has been asked very reluctantly to take on.
Normally, Opus Dei operates below the surface.
It doesn't advertise itself.
It picks the members it wants to recruit and goes after them, kind of, usually surreptitiously or very kind of covertly.
But at one stage, it's asked to take over the CIC in Washington.
It's asked by the local Archbishop, and it kind of can't turn them down.
So suddenly it's got this kind of very public venue, and it chooses McCloskey to become the face of that venue.
And he absolutely transformed this place.
This place becomes a hub for not just kind of conservative Catholics, but he's able to draw in People who are not religious in any way.
He's able to draw in Jews and he's able to draw in Protestants.
And he convinces so many of them to convert.
He becomes known as the convert maker.
And he's giving interviews to the New York Times.
He's on like meat press.
He becomes the face of Catholicism.
In Washington, DC. He's the start of this turbocharged Opus Dei in Washington, DC. Right since the start, since the 1950s, Opus Dei had been operating in Washington.
It's a place where society is formed.
It's a place where laws are made, decisions, and it's a place of power.
And so it targets Washington, DC from the very early days.
It sets up a couple of schools in the city.
But I think until Father McCloskey lands there, its recruitment efforts, its infiltration of the Washington kind of political and legal elite, it's kind of limited.
It has a few successes.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he goes on Opus Dei retreats.
A bunch of other political figures are involved, but not to the same extent they are once Father
C. John Manfred.
And yeah, he really transformed things, although it all ends in, yes, a scandal.
Absolutely.
So, friends, the way I... if you see a picture of Father John McCloskey, he's very handsome.
He's very photogenic. And to me, as a former Wall Street person, it's almost like if you took Leo DiCaprio's character from Wolf of Wall Street, and you made him like an Opus Dei member and then priest, and then you plopped him right in the middle of Washington, D.C. That ferocious vision to convert, to gain influence, to gain power, to win you over to his vision of the world, aggressive, but also convincing, incredibly handsome and charming, yet also won't take no for an answer.
So Father John Really takes the Opus Dei vision for the church and for the world, and he applies it to DC. It costs less than that latte you bought on the way to work today.
Check it out on the show notes. Remember, November 21 will be at USC, 7 p.m., November 22 in San Diego at the Convention Center.
Details are coming soon.
Make sure to check back to our website and our socials later this week.
