Lazy Caturday Reads: The Powerful Political Influence of Opus Dei

By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Happy Caturday!!

I wanted to post an article that appeared in New York Magazine a couple of days ago, but I can no longer get past the paywall. It was about the ultra right wing Catholic sect Opus Dei, which has become a very powerful influence in Washington DC. The article was based on a new book that will be released on October 1, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. 

Here is a description of the book from Publisher’s Weekly:

Abuse, enslavement, and financial schemes are the stock in trade of the shadowy Catholic sect Opus Dei, according to this chilling debut exposé. Journalist Gore stumbled onto the institution’s web of influence during the 2017 collapse of Banco Popular, when he discovered that the Spanish bank’s biggest shareholder, mysteriously named the Syndicate, could be traced to Opus Dei. Combing through the Syndicate’s sprawling network of foundations and nonprofits led Gore to uncover Opus Dei’s connections to offshore money-laundering schemes and a global web of vocational schools implicated in human trafficking of children. Delving into archives and conducting interviews with former members, Gore alleges that a mission to “serve God by striving for perfection even in the most everyday tasks” has masked abuse since Opus Dei’s 1928 founding by Josemaría Escrivá, whose recruitment methods rapidly turned cultlike, incorporating “listening devices” and “prescription drugs.” While Gore reports that today abuse permeates the entire hierarchy of the organization, he most harrowingly recounts the plight of its lowest rung: underage girls assigned to household work in Opus Dei residencies, where many later reported being held captive; others minors connected to Opus Dei have reported instances of sexual abuse. Gore’s most alarming line of inquiry is into Opus Dei’s political influence in Washington, D.C., via the Catholic Information Center and the Federalist Society. Readers will be disturbed.

Some of the powerful people who are known to be members of Opus Dei: Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence and Gini Thomas, J.D. Vance, Leonard Leo, who hand-picked Trump’s SCOTUS picks, and Project 2025 author Kevin Roberts. There are many more. 

Rachel Leingang and Stephanie Kirchgaessner at The Guardian (from July, 2024): Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei.

Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and the architect of Project 2025, the conservative thinktank’s road map for a second Trump presidency, has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.

Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that – for years – he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.

In the speech – which he delivered at the CIC and was recorded and is available online – Roberts spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals that he supports but are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.

Outlawing birth control is the “hardest” political battle facing conservatives in the future, the 50-year-old political strategist said, but he urged conservatives to pursue even small legislative victories – what he called “radical incrementalism” – to advance their most rightwing policy objectives.

Roberts gained notoriety this year as the leading force behind Project 2025, a foundation plan backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to radically upend a broad range of policies if Trump gets elected again, from limiting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights and dismantling the Department of Education, to ending diversity programs and increasing government support for “fertility awareness” programs, like ovulation tracking and practicing periodic abstinence, instead of more reliable contraception.

But Roberts’ personal ties to Opus Dei and the significance of his affiliation, have received far less attention.

King Cat, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Gareth Gore, the author of a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, said members of the Catholic organization are engaged in “a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality”. The group’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, saw his followers as part of a “rising militia”, Gore said, who were seeking to “enter battle against the enemies of Christ”.

“Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society,” Gore said. “For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite – and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”

Leo is a conservative activist who has led the Republican mission to install the rightwing majority in the supreme court and finances many of the groups signed on to Project 2025.

Like Roberts, Leo also has links to the Opus Dei-linked CIC. In a 2022 speech accepting the CIC’s highest honor, the John Paul II New Evangelization award, Leo praised the center while also referring to his political opponents as “vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who were under the influence of the devil….

One of the core tenets of Opus Dei is that it does not believe in the traditional separation of church and state. Instead, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, it believes the two ought to have a symbiotic relationship.

I hope you’ll read the rest of the article. It’s not as extensive as thJe one behind the paywall at New York Magazine, but it’s good.

Matthew Fox at Daily Meditations (May, 2024): A Deeper Look at Opus Dei, Christofascism, Misogyny & SCOTUS.

Since the far-right wing cult in the Roman Catholic church known as “Opus Dei” has played such a prominent role in Leonard Leo’s life and in the current Supreme Court that he has fashioned, it seems fitting to take a closer look at the organization.

Christofascism is always steeped in misogyny.  So was the fascist founder of Opus Dei, Josemaría Escrivá, who was rushed into canonization shortly after he died.  Maria del Carmen Tapia wrote a tell-all book about Escrivá which became a best-seller in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany.  The Boston Globe called it a picture of an obsessively secretive, manipulative, and sexist organization with a virtual cultlike veneration of its founder.

Tapia played significant roles in her 18 years with Opus Dei including working as Escrivá’s secretary for seven years.  She wrote about what she saw.  “There’s a constant sexual obsession within Opus Dei” she writes.

Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi Ghost and Cat

Beating of one’s body was encouraged as a spiritual practice and Tapia confessed that “I treated my body with brutality.”  At one meeting where Tapia was present, Escrivá raged and shouted to fellow priests, Take the one [woman], lift up her skirt, take down her panties, and whack her on the behind until she talks.  MAKE HER TALK!

He shouted at Tapia, You’re a wicked woman, sleazy, scum!  That’s what you are!  She endured many interrogations and “advisers” were stationed inside and outside her room who followed her even to the bathroom. She wrote, I began to shake almost constantly as a result of my terror.  I was afraid they would take me to a mental institution as I knew they had done to other members.

In her final meeting with Escrivá, he shouted at her, You are a seductress with all your immorality and indecency!. …You’re wicked!  Indecent!….Hear me well!  WHORE!  SOW!

Escrivá hated Vatican II and liberation theology and actually was heard to praise Hitler.  But two papacies, those of JPII and Benedict XVI, appointed numerous members of his sect as bishops and cardinals in South and North America.

Pope Francis has tried to marginalize Opus Dei, apparently without much success.

It should be very concerning that J.D. Vance is a member of this cult.

Molly Olmstead at Slate: J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling. Subhead: He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic—of a very specific type.

In 2021, when J.D. Vance was asked at a conference why he had converted to Catholicism just two years earlier, he had a fairly simple answer.

“I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old,” he said.

This anti-modern worldview is key to understanding Vance. In a party long dominated by anti-intellectual evangelical Christians with a hearty distrust of institutions, Vance stands out among its leaders for having embraced a church with a complex social doctrine built off the work of ancient philosophers. His enthusiasm for a particular and relatively obscure kind of contemporary Catholic political thought shows up in his politics—his longing for Americans to build robust nuclear families, his comments about banning porn, his scorn for childless cat ladies. It’s tempting to see these stances as old ones from the Christian right, familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of the GOP in the past couple of decades, but Vance’s past comments indicate that they’re motivated by something newer, and more radical, than that.

Vance wasn’t always so unusual among his fellow Republicans: He grew up loosely evangelical Christian; he writes in Hillbilly Elegy that his commitment to his father’s church was strong but short-lived. As a young man, he identified for a while as an atheist. Then, as he recounted in a 2020 essay about his conversion for the Catholic magazine the Lamp, he reconnected with Christianity when he was searching for greater meaning in his life during law school. He began to feel drawn to Catholicism in particular after reading up on Catholic moral philosophers and discussing theology with conservative Dominican friars he knew.

The Cat Which Relaxes, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

After he officially converted in 2019, Vance explained in an interview with his friend Rod Dreher—a conservative writer and Catholic convert who later went on to convert, again, to Orthodox Christianity—that he had to Catholicism in part because of the writings of Saint Augustine. “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way,” Vance said. “As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.” [….]

But as Vance would explain at that 2021 conference (held by the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic organization), he was also drawn to Catholicism for its rules and relative stability over centuries. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux,” Vance said. “The things you believed 10 years ago were no longer acceptable to believe 10 years later.”

“We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country,” Vance said at the 2021 Napa Institute event. “Even among healthy, intact families, they’re not having enough kids such that we’re going to have a long-term future in this country.” For his Senate campaign, also in 2021, Vance praised Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán for policies that incentivized marriage and children. Orbán’s government had offered loans to married couples that were forgiven if the couple stayed together and had three children. (Orbán is not himself Catholic but has privileged Christianity in a country dominated by Catholicism.) “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

These anti-modern comments fit with a certain kind of worldview that prizes a traditional and family-oriented society above individual liberties—and even democracy. It’s a guiding philosophy of a new faction of the conservative movement that pulls from elements of both the left and far right, that champions populist economics and radically conservative social policies, and that promises a revolution in the entire political order: the postliberal right.

Olmstead doesn’t mention Opus Dei, but she spells out Vance’s ultra right wing Catholic religious beliefs. There’s more at the link.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all this. I guess I’m going down a rabbit hole, as Dakinikat often says. But I wanted to call attention to the fact that it’s not just evangelical Protestants that are influencing our government–far right wing Catholics may be even more powerful, and now those powerful people are trying to place one of their own (Vance) in the White House.

One more article on Opus Dei’s influence, focusing on Leonard Leo. Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times: The Man Behind the End of Roe v. Wade Has Big Plans for America.

In the world of political fund-raising, there is hard money, soft money, dark money — and Leonard Leo money.

Political advocacy and charitable groups controlled by Leo now have far more assets than the combined total cash on hand of the Republican and Democratic National, Congressional and Senatorial committees: $440.9 million.

Leo is a 58-year-old graduate of Cornell Law School, a Catholic with ties to Opus Dei — the most conservative “personal prelature” in the church hierarchy — chief strategist of the Federalist Society for more than a quarter century and a crucial force behind the confirmations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. He has emerged over the past five years as the dominant fund-raiser on the right.

As Leo has risen to this pinnacle of influence, he has become rich, profiting from the organizations he has created and from the consulting fees paid by the conservative advocacy and lobbying groups he funds.

Leo has an overarching agenda. In a 2022 speech he made upon receiving the John Paul II New Evangelization Award at the Catholic Information Center, he warned fellow Catholics: “Catholic evangelization faces extraordinary threats and hurdles. Our culture is more hateful and intolerant of Catholicism than at any other point in our lives. It despises who we are, what we profess and how we act.”

Inca, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Leo describes the adversaries of Catholicism as “these barbarians, secularists and bigots” who “have been growing more numerous over the past few years. They control and use many levers of power.” He is determined to wrest the levers of power from “the grasp of liberals” and place them, permanently if possible, with those he sees as their rightful owner: social and economic conservatives.

Leo has most famously used his network and personal influence not only to establish a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court but also to secure appointment of deeply conservative justices throughout the federal and state court systems.

At the same time, Leo has provided essential support to the full gamut of right-wing advocacy and lobbying organizations, including the Federalist Society, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

The millions of dollars Leo has raised through his tax-exempt nonprofits have, in turn, flowed to profit-making consulting companies owned, in part or wholly, by him. In 2016, he created the BH Group, a for-profit consulting firm that is now defunct, which received at least $6.9 million from tax- exempt donor nonprofits run by him.

Four years later, Leo formed CRC Advisors, also a profit-making consulting firm. Since then, two of his tax-exempt donor organizations, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund, have paid CRC Advisors more than $77 million, according to reports filed with the I.R.S.

Leo is a prodigious fund-raiser whose organizations take in and hand out hundreds of millions annually. For example, the 85 Fund, according to the I.R.S., raised $317.9 million from 2020 to 2022 and gave out grants totaling $147.4 million. During that same period, the 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors — of which Leo is chairman — fees totaling $55.2 million, according to I.R.S. filings and research by Accountable.us and ProPublica.

Leonard Leo is definitely a member of Opus Dei, and there’s much more information about him at the link. Here is a gift article in case you’d like to read the whole thing.

I have to end here, because I’m having WordPress problems. I’ll add a few more links in the comments.

Take care of yourselves and have a nice weekend.