Special Episode: Is Pope Leo Really Dissolving Opus Dei?
This episode delves into the recent controversies surrounding Opus Dei, a secretive and influential organization within the Catholic Church. According to a report from Infovaticana, Opus Dei faces a significant internal rupture that could see it fragmented into three distinct bodies, effectively dissolving its current structure. Annika Brockschmidt guest hosts in conversation with journalist Gareth Gore, author of 'Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church.' Gareth elaborates on the historical context and modern operations of Opus Dei, including its recruitment and coercive practices. He also highlights the organization's conflicts with the Vatican and ongoing abuse allegations.
Opus by Gareth Gore: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Opus/Gareth-Gore/9781668016152
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Last week, a new report dropped from Info Vaticana that claimed that Opus Day is on the brink of a major internal rupture.
This according to the Catholic Herald and other sites.
There is a sense that big changes are coming to Opus Day.
Now, if you don't know about Opus Day, you'll hear about it in a minute, but it is a kind of secretive society, a very peculiar institution within the Catholic hierarchy that allows its members, both priests and laypeople, to have a wide range of freedom for recruiting, fundraising, and action in the public square.
Most importantly, for those interested in American politics, Opus Day has an overwhelming presence in Washington, D.C., and over the last decades has recruited high-level, influential, powerful people to its ministry and to its causes.
Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and the shepherd of Project 2025, often seeks counsel and ministry from the Opus Day Center in Washington, D.C. There are, of course, ties to Leonard Leo and all of the ways that Leo raises money for various political enterprises, including his work on the Supreme Court and all over the country.
Today, we have Gareth Gore back on the program.
Gareth is a financial reporter who is the author of the magisterial book called Opus, The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church.
I interviewed him a couple of months ago when the book came out, but we had him back on because there is simply no one else in the world who can talk about this potential dissolution of Opus Day with the kind of insight and knowledge that Gareth has.
Gareth is in London.
I am on the West Coast.
And so the time zones were hard to make work on short notice.
And thus my friend, the wonderful and talented and just absolutely incredible Annika Brock Schmidt, stepped in and was able to interview Gareth to talk about what's happening with Opus Day.
If you don't know Annika, she is a German-based journalist who has written all over the place in U.S. outlets and in Germany, is a frequent contributor to German television, writes for newspapers in Germany, and has written two amazing books about Christian nationalism and politics in the United States.
Her and I have also written a piece together in the past for NBC News.
And there's really no one else I think could do this interview better than Annika, and that includes myself.
So without further ado, enjoy their conversation and listen in on what lies ahead for Opus Dei.
So I'm here with Gareth Gore.
He's a journalist and expert on Opus Day, and he's here today to talk to us about some recent headlines that have shaken up the Catholic ride.
To start things up, could you maybe give us, I know this is a lot to ask, but maybe a short history of Opus Day and the role they play, especially in contemporary politics in Washington.
Opus Day has been around for just 100 years, and it was born in the years just before the Spanish Civil War, as a point when Spanish society was really kind of torn in two.
You know, you had the workers rising up.
They'd overthrown the monarchy in Spain.
They were beginning to turn their backs on the church, which is critical.
And the Spanish priests, Jose Maria Escrivar, supposedly had this vision from God for this new movement, which started out with quite benign aims at first, but which very quickly against this backdrop of social strife and especially this backdrop of people turning their backs and beginning to question the church began, it became much more of a politically militant movement.
And he very specifically charged his followers with entering into battle against the enemies of Christ and specifically with infiltrating, I guess, the believers of power in society.
He wanted them to infiltrate the government, the worlds of business, journalism, to kind of really be this reactionary force.
Fast forward to today, and Opus Day, wherever it's expanded in the world, it's done so with that aim of penetrating the upper echelons of society.
And, you know, in the US, it's really focused its expansion and its recruitment in the Washington, D.C. area.
Opus Day has about 3,000 members in the States, and about 1,000 of them are in the Washington, D.C. area alone.
Oh, wow.
I mean, I was kind of surprised by that myself when I first discovered that.
I mean, you would expect as a Catholic organization that its followers would be focused in, you know, the big Catholic cities like, you know, Boston, New York, Miami these days, Chicago.
But no, Washington, D.C. is.
And that's because this is an organization which is very much by invitation only.
Unlike the rest of the Catholic Church, one can just kind of knock on the door of your local church and say, hey, how do I become a member?
With Opus Day, they find you and they invite you in.
And so they very much focus their recruitment efforts in the Washington, D.C. area.
Today, if you lift any kind of conservative stone in Washington, D.C., and you're bound to find someone who's either a member of Opus Day or affiliated to Elpus Day in some way.
I mean, just to show the kind of extent and the heights of Opus Day's recruitment in the States.
I mean, you've got people like Kevin Roberts, who's the president of a very powerful mobby group, think tank called the Heritage Foundation, the architect of this thing called Project 2025.
He's very much affiliated to Upus Day.
He visits the Opus Day Center in central DC regularly to get spiritual information from them.
You've got people like Leonard Leo, who is, I guess, the architect of this conservative Catholic takeover of the US Supreme Court.
He is a director of the Opus Day Center in central DC.
Other people affiliated to that center include the former Attorney General, Bill Barr.
The name was escaping me for a minute then.
Mick Mulbeni, the former kind of White House budget czar, Petsipology, the former White House Chief Council.
I mean, you know, and there are numerous senators and congresspeople who are also affiliated to this group.
So, you know, they've really very successfully, I would argue, penetrated the Washington conservative religious elite.
And to set up the news piece that we're going to talk about, I think we have to briefly touch on the recent relationship between the Vatican and Opus Day, because they have been in a kind of standoff for a couple of years now, at least publicly.
Could you briefly outline for us what this conflict is about?
Opus Day officially is, of course, loyal to the Pope.
You know, whatever he asks of them, they do not quite the way Hughes has been working the past few years.
Basically, it all started like three years ago when Pope Francis decided the time had come to take action against Opus Day.
I mean, I think from my reporting, it was quite clear that he'd had a few run-ins with this group during his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
And he'd really, I guess, been quite unhappy about the way that they'd operated almost outside of the normal hierarchy of the church.
They've been free.
And this was a power that had been given to them by John Paul II in the early 80s.
He basically gave them this new, he created this new, I guess, label for them within the church.
They were given this label of, they were called the personal prelature.
They're the only personal prelature ever to have existed in the entire history of the church.
And what that meant was that they were able to operate outside the normal hierarchy.
They didn't have to report to the local bishop or archbishop, wherever they were operating.
They could do things however they saw fit.
They only reported to the Pope.
That's very unusual, right?
I mean, this was a status that was created before Opus Day.
It was, I mean, it was the doors opened to personal prelatures in as part of the Vatican Vatican II.
You know, this was kind of a possibility, but it was mainly designed for hierarchical associations.
But what Opus Day did was they'd been wanting kind of some new designation for many, many years.
Its founder had been hunting around for this since at least the late 50s.
And they saw in this new kind of creation potential.
And they kind of basically persuaded the Pope and the Vatican to, I guess, to change this thing that was meant just for priests and associations of priests to be all-encompassing for all members of Opus Daymes.
98% of El Posé members are lay people.
And so they very successfully against many voices in the Vatican, including Cardinal Retzinger, later, obviously Pope Benedict.
He was dead against this.
Many people were dead against this book.
So they'd had this special designation and it had caused all kinds of tensions in the church.
At the same time, there were all of these abuse allegations against the group as well.
Allegations that it was spiritually abusing its members, using these kind of spiritual guidance sessions to push them into certain things against their will, that it was, you know, psychologically, emotionally, even physically abusing its members, that it was actively recruiting, grooming children, all of these, you know, horrendous issues around the organization.
And so Pope Francis decided in 2022, the time had finally come to take action.
He effectively put the group on notice and said, you need, you know, you guys need to sort your house out.
You need to rip up your constitution, start again.
It just dragged its feet and dragged its feet.
So a year later, the Pope issued a second moted proprio where he said, enough's enough.
He basically kind of tore up the authority they had over the lay members and made it quite clear that they were going to be very much demoted in the hierarchy of the church.
And since then, we've had this standoff where they'd basically been given a chance.
They threw that chance away.
And then the Pope made it quite clear, we're going to really kind of drive through these serious reforms.
Then there was this whole to and fro.
So Opus Day was told to go rewrite its constitution to work with the dichestory of the clergy to agree on a text.
They dragged their feet for two years.
And then just before Francis died in April, the text was ready.
Opus Day finally convened a meeting of its senior members, got them all to come to Rome where they were going to approve this text that had been agreed with the Vatican.
What happened?
So all of these people gather in Rome are about to vote.
Pope Francis dies.
So they immediately cancel the vote.
They say it's because it's not the time.
We kind of, you know, out of respect for the Pope, we want to, we'll hold this vote another time.
Another less sympathetic reading with that is that they thought, here's an opportunity.
This is what Francis wanted.
Maybe the next guy will be more friendly.
And so they cancelled the vote and everyone was like, what's the new Pope going to do?
Now, interestingly, the very first thing that one of the very first meetings, very first audiences that Pope Leo gave was the head of Opus Day.
He basically summoned the head of Opus Day to the Vatican to find out what this was.
And Opus Day tried to spin that meeting and say, ah, look how close we are to the Pope.
It's a new start, a new beginning.
I remember that, yeah.
And everyone's been on Tentahooks since to see, you know, to try and work out what's going on, including myself.
It's been very difficult to read.
Yeah.
On the one hand, the Pope's been giving what seemed like concessions to Opus Day.
But now we know that in the background, this whole thing was working through as well.
So yes, that's, yeah, it's been a very interesting few years.
Now, a couple of days ago, Info Vaticana, a Spanish Catholic website, published a report that was potentially really explosive.
Gareth, can you sum up for us, first of all, what this report claimed?
And then in a second step, because I just mentioned the name of the website, who published it?
What is Info Vaticana?
And can we trust this report?
And if not, why?
So this report, it's true, is absolutely bombshell news.
So the report at its core is saying that Opus Day is going to be effectively disbanded.
It's going to be split in three.
Opus Day from now on is basically just going to be a group of priests.
Only priests will belong to Opus Day, which means that 98% of its members are being cast out.
98% of lay members are being cast out.
They will no longer officially be members of Opus Day.
So that's going to be one part.
The second part will be that, because there are lots of priests who weren't ordained inside of Opus Day, but who later decided they like what it does and they want to be part of it.
So they'll be part of this second group, which kind of already exists, this kind of thing called the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross.
So you'll have Opus Day priests in one group.
You'll have this priestly society of the Holy Cross for other priests who want to be affiliated to Opus Day.
And then the rest of the members, this 98% of members who currently make up the body of Opus Day, they will be allowed to kind of voluntarily associate with Opus Day.
But the report makes it quite clear that Opus Day will no longer have any jurisdiction or authority over them.
And their spiritual journey will be kind of through the local diocese, just like the rest of ordinary ethics.
So Opus Day is going to be ripped apart, effectively disbanded.
So what is this website that's published this?
So this is Info Vaticana, which is a Spanish website set up by a guy who in his use at least was a member of Opus Day and who kind of lets his membership lapse, but has stayed very close to the movements.
They, you know, this website means extremely conservative, often publishes very pro-Opus Day pieces.
It's kind of funny because in the run-up to the conclave in May, they were publishing all kinds of smear pieces against progressive candidates, including the current Pope.
They published this whole dossier about him supposedly having mishandled all these cases in Peru.
They were the first ones actually to subsequently other people have kind of reported this, but they were the first ones to publish the accusations.
And then, you know, they do have a record of getting scoops on Opus Day.
So, you know, they're clearly well plugged in.
They know what's going on.
They're clearly talking to people inside of Opus Day and talking to people inside the Vatican.
Now, whether this is 100% true, I do not know, but there have been other things that have happened in the last few days, which make me think that this is indeed true.
Do you have an example?
So the day after this report first came out, the head of Opus Day released a letter to the membership, membership in Grotik Commas, I guess we have to say now, where he kind of, I mean, to kind of paraphrase, he was saying that, you know, change is coming, but we have to remain loyal to the ways of the family.
We have to continue these family traditions.
And, you know, and another kind of line I picked up on was, you know, he was basically saying that we need to be, you know, we need to remain unified and these small cost customs and things that bind us together.
So the subtext was, yeah, there's going to be big change coming.
It's going to rip us apart.
But the reasons you joined Opus Day are still there.
And all these little things that we do that kind of make us different, carry on doing them, no matter what the kind of law says, no matter what kind of law says, we should carry on with these traditions.
So maybe just to reiterate this, let's dig into a bit more into the detail of the changes that if this report is true, Pope Leo could implement.
So if I understand you correctly, you're saying that essentially Opuste, the way it would change the organization, if, you know, what this report outlines actually happens, this would be not just a drastic change, but the organization would kind of cease to exist in the way that it has until now.
So I'm just interested.
What do you think?
What could be the motivation for the Pope to implement these changes now?
Do you think this is a longer standing theological conflict?
Do you think it's also in part an attempt to counter the very negative press that Opuste has sort of accumulated over the last couple of years?
I mean, we don't know.
We can't look into his head, but what's your assessment of that?
I guess the simple answer to that is that he didn't choose to kind of take this on.
This was just something that was lying in his intray when he got the job and something that he just has had to sort out.
But why has this been happening, I guess?
Why did Francis take this on?
And why has Pope Leo decided that, yes, he needs to see this through rather than just kind of leave them be?
I think it's pretty obvious to me that this is all about the abuse allegations against the group and specifically the spiritual abuse allegations.
So the former members have made it quite clear that, and we talked earlier about how the group targets its recruits, it grooms them.
And, you know, from I've spoken to more than 100 former members and members who haven't just been kind of recruited themselves, but have been part of this recruitment mechanism.
And it's quite clear that what happens is once Opus Day decides that you're a target, the way that they basically coerce people into becoming members.
And once you're a full member, you're then expected to do these regular things that they call in.
you know, they're very euphemistically call, they call it the chat or the confidence.
So every, in addition to confessing and attending mass and performing these other kind of rituals that Opus Day members do, infamously the, you know, whipping themselves and wearing the sillis, you're also expected to do this thing called the chat or the confidence, which is what used to be called a manifestation of conscience.
So forced manifestations of conscience were basically outlawed by the Vatican in 1890, I think it was.
But Opus Day makes it quite clear that as a member, it's a requirement of membership is to do these manifestations of conscience.
Sorry, just to interject, for non-Catholic listeners, can you explain what that means, a manifestation of conscience?
Well, in the Opus Day, I mean, traditionally, these were, it was quite common for religious orders, especially to kind of require this.
And it's kind of, I guess, in very simple terms, it's kind of going further than, you know, in confession, you confess your sins.
In these sessions, what happens, and this is certainly what happens in the Opus Day world these days, is that you're expected to talk about every aspect of your life.
So you talk about, you know, your home life, your sex life, your work life, any doubts you're having.
Maybe you talk about your, you know, any kind of thoughts you're having about political happenings in the world or whatever, you know?
And so, I mean, they're like therapy sessions, I guess, but you don't just have someone listening to you.
The other person involved in this conversation is giving you advice according to their reading of the Bible.
And the advice is not being given by a priest.
It's by an Opus Day celibate member in a new room.
So Opus Day members are required to do this.
I guess, you know, some people would argue, some former members certainly have argued that this, it's forced upon them.
You know, it's not just a requirement.
It's something that's absolutely expected.
And if you do not do it, you're cast out.
And the allegation is that Opus Day has used these sessions, one, to collect information.
So very personal information is gathered in these conversations.
Report cards are written down by the numera giving these sessions.
And these report cards are then kind of handed up the chain to the kind of national headquarters.
So one, they use it to collect information, but also they use these spiritual guidance sessions to gently push the person to do things that might be beneficial for Opus Day, whether that's donating more money, whether that's encouraging them to start a new school or whatever.
But these sessions are not used to enhance the spiritual life of the member or to address problems that the member themselves have brought up, but to advance the kind of agenda of Opus Day.
So I think, I mean, I think that's the kind of the main reason that the Pope has decided that actions are taken because of the widespread spiritual abuse.
But also, there are other things going on as well.
There are two very serious outstanding complaints at the Vatican.
One from a group of Argentinian women who alleged that they were coerced into joining as kids, that they were basically enslaved by the organization and forced to work as unpaid domestic servants for decades.
That arrived at the Vatican in, I think it was 2021.
So just a few months ahead of the first month of Propio.
Since then, there's been another formal complaints by dozens of former members who allege all kinds of spiritual, emotional, psychological, physical abuse.
So yeah, I think it's the reason that the Pope is acting is, you know, these various reports of abuse against the group, spiritual and otherwise.
And you've done a lot of investigative reporting on Opus Day.
You've written a book about the organization and you've detailed the abusive practices that you've observed that you've reported on.
Do you think the modifications and the reforms that Pope Leo might take if they happened as they're outlined in this report?
Do you think that's enough?
No.
I mean, I think, and In a way, I'm quite disappointed with the way that the Vatican and Pope Francis and Pope Leo have gone about this.
I've been working with a group of former members of Opus Day, and we've been hammering on the door of the Vatican saying, guys, we have information.
We've been trying to do this very subtly.
We kept all of this private until recently.
We've been knocking on the door saying, we can help you.
If you think that reform of this organization is necessary, you need to understand how it works.
And how it works isn't just simply reading through the statutes and kind of finding alterations that might work for both parties.
Understanding how Opus Day works day to day, how it recruits, how it coerces people, how these spiritual guidance sessions work.
And, you know, just in general, how this organization functions.
We have information that we can offer.
You can help you to understand.
And, you know, our overtures to the Vatican have been completely ignored.
We know that, so we, we, you know, the way the Vatican works, there are all kinds of people who try to stop things reaching the desks of people higher up.
And so we sent four different letters via different routes.
We had confirmation from somebody that works in the office of Pope Leo that at least one of the letters had reached his desk.
So we know that he is aware of our offer, but we've been met with complete silence.
So first of all, the author was there to help them to get these reforms right.
I think my reading of the reforms is that they come from the right place.
They're trying to do the right thing, but they do not understand the way that this organization works.
So there are the statutes, the official kind of constitution of Opus Day, which was approved by the Vatican in the early 1980s.
But that'sn't what dictates the way that things happen inside the organization at all.
There are hundreds of pages of secret documents that were written by the group's founder, this Spanish priest called Josemaria Escriva.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote these literally hundreds of pages of rules dictating how, you know, even the tiniest bit of life inside of Opus, how it should work.
Now, if you're a member of Opus Day, well, you believe that these writings from the founder, he wrote out his vision.
He told everyone that this vision had come directly from God.
This was a divinely inspired group.
This was a divinely inspired way of life.
And so if you're a member of Opus Day, you believe that the founder's writings, the rules that he said that you have to live by, they came directly from God.
And so for the Pope to say, you can't do things that way anymore, it just doesn't work because you still believe that this guy had this divine inspiration, that these rules for life in Opus Day came directly from God.
What's more, Josemaria Escriva today is a saint in the Dutch.
I was about to ask that.
So that makes the argument from the Pope's side more difficult, right?
Because you can't really, if he doesn't want to go against a saint, he kind of has to hold up the bases of Opus Day, the origin story, so to speak.
I think the only way or really getting a grips with the abuse inside of Opus Day, which is, you know, this is not just something that's kind of evolved over the years and people have, you know, become bad.
This abuse has crept in.
A lot of these abusive practices are stipulated in the writings of Escriva.
The life inside of Opus Day is based on these abusive practices.
It's what the founder wanted.
It's supposedly what God wanted if you believe what the founder said.
So yeah, I think the only way of really getting to grips with these abuses is to call this foundational story of Opus Day.
And I'm sorry to say it, but I think the Pope also has to reopen the canonization of Escriva.
There were all kinds of, there was a huge scandal when he was made into a saint in 2002.
And when he was beatified in the early 90s as well, former members tried to have their voices heard.
People who'd lived with this guy tried to have their voices heard at the Vatican.
They would turn away.
Obesday launched his campaign to smear these people and say that they weren't reliable witnesses.
The Vatican completely sided with Opus Day.
So I don't, you know, there are grounds for reopening the canonization of Escuiva.
And in my eyes, that's a way to really cost real reform is by kind of, you know, revoking the sainthood and forcing Opus Day to hand over all of these hidden documents that it's sitting on, that it's using to dictate how it runs its organization, hand them all over to the Vatican, have the Vatican pour through them and decide, you know, which elements of life in Opuste should remain and which should be banned.
Because at the moment, to just kind of, to just rewrite the statutes is just like the real dedicated members of Opus Day are going to ignore the statutes and they're going to follow the word of Ed Guivar above that of the Pope.
What do you think?
Is there something that Opus Day is going to try to do to stop this?
What can they do to try and stop the reforms if they are imminent?
I mean, I think, again, coming back to the letter that the head of Opuste wrote to the membership the day after this report came out, he said we must not become discouraged in the face of the external difficulties that come with the times and places in which we live.
And so the subtext there, I believe, is he's saying this is a difficult moment for us.
The current Pope and maybe the previous Pope were against us, are against us.
But these things will pass.
Another time will come when another Pope will kind of reassert the true meaning of Opuste.
And it's our task to carry on.
The work is in our hands like an inheritance received, a treasure that we must collaborate in making fruitful and passing on.
So whatever the Vatican says, even if we're told to stop doing these practices, we have this inheritance that we have to carry on.
We pass on to the next generation in the hope that there'll be another conservative Pope one day who sees the light in Escuva.
So I think what's going to happen is that publicly, Opuste will comply and they'll nod their head and say, of course, Pope Leo, we will do what you ask of us.
But that the real Opus Day will kind of be driven underground, that these practices will carry on, but they'll carry on out of sight.
And it's going to become even more difficult for the Vatican to keep tabs on what's going on.
That's what I fear is going to happen.
I mean, there are, I've been talking to former members kind of over the past few days about what they make of it.
And I think there are some people who are more optimistic than me.
They hope that with this clear kind of lap on the wrists and this clear kind of removal of the sovereignty of lay members, they think that it's going to become more difficult for Opus Day to recruit, you know, to the next generation and that slowly the group will just kind of die out and just become this, maybe this group of priests.
I don't know.
I mean, Opuste has enormous resources at its disposal.
It has more than 300 schools around the world.
It has more than a dozen, I think almost 20, in fact, universities.
All these things are kind of run at arms and not officially run by Opus Day, but they're run by Opus Day affiliated groups.
Just in terms of money as well, like in the US alone, there are more than 100 nonprofits which are affiliated to Opus Day with almost a billion dollars of assets between them.
That's just the US.
Now, the US is not the largest country by any means for Opus Day.
Like, I'm sure the resources that Opuste has indirectly in Spain and Italy, Mexico, across Latin America, far greater than that.
We're talking at least, at a very minimum, several billion dollars of resources.
These reforms that are being pushed through by the Vatican won't even touch any of that.
So I fear that what's going to happen is that, like I said, on the face of it, they'll agree and comply.
But then you've got this kind of underground network of foundations with enormous resources that will carry on pushing this message of the great San Jose Maria and his teachings and how we must follow them and be faithful to the workings of our great founder.
Yeah, I don't see the reforms really having a huge impact other than a bit of bad publicity for the group in the short term.
And they've proven themselves very, very adept at taking on bad publicity.
So yeah, they'll get through this.
Gareth, thank you so much for your time.
If you're listening, you can find Gareth's book, Opus, The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, wherever books are sold.
And that's it from us.
And back to you, Brad.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
Hope you enjoyed the conversation between Gareth and Annika, and you learned a lot about what's happening with Opus Day and what Opus Day is and does and why it's such a threat to our democracy and to people all over the world.
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