Opus Dei and the Catholic Right

Notes on "The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church," by Gareth Gore

Torreciudad shrine, which the local bishop has asserted his authority over, via Donostiako Elizbarrutia

Opus Dei is something you cannot avoid if you’re on the right involved in politics. It has an enormous and seemingly growing presence in Washington, and it was by and large this network that was hugely influential in the Trump years. Abramoff’s law is that to get anything done in the GOP, there are the Jews, the gays, and the Mormons; pick any two. In the Trump era we might add the Catholic codicil: sometimes you have to ask the Catholics, but the only ones who matter are tied to the Opus Dei child trafficking enterprise.

The early history of the movement, as written here, is rather eye-opening and certainly at odds with the airbrushed hagiographies of Josemaria Escriva one can pick up. His movement has always had a semi-clandestine character, with one of its first study houses disguised as a school of law and architecture. This is far from ideal. In Spain in the 1930s, though, one should probably ask whether it might have been a prudent precaution out of fears that what happened in Russia in 1917 might happen there, too. It almost did.

Getting a handle on what this movement is about is like nailing jello to a wall. Gore often points out—in a criticism echoed by the pope—that its stated charism of sanctifying ordinary life is quite out of step with the way it tends to target the wealthy and powerful as recruits. A criticism you hear from left-of-center Catholics is that they are culture warriors, which is not to say they are traditionalists, exactly. They have no particular commitment to the Tridentine Mass, and the concept of a personal prelature didn’t exist before Vatican II.

Another big theme is a strange fussiness about etiquette and propriety that evokes the imitation of aristocratic sensibilities but in a way that doesn’t come naturally—one recruiting trick by a numerary is to peel oranges with a spoon in front of prospects. And then there’s their strange habit of avoiding Catholic names for their institutions—Oakcrest, Woodlawn, and so forth. They refer to becoming a supernumerary or numerary as a “vocation,” which is not the typical Catholic use of the word, which refers to marriage or religious orders.

All of this leaves me wondering what exactly these people are about; there’s a formlessness and confusion to it which, even apart from the more serious charges here, would indicate a need to rein it in.

A few other details about the early going of Opus Dei in Spain set a pattern you can see in Latin America in the Cold War. The movement faced immense opposition, including to this day from the Spanish bishops’ conference and the Jesuits, but one of the unusual quarters it came from was the Falange. The Falange reported them to a Franco-era tribunal on Freemasonry. And yet in the factional struggles within the Franco regime, Opus Dei comes out the winner, with its Fabian strategy of targeting businessmen and intellectuals, eventually gaining a majority of Franco’s cabinet ministers in the 1960s at the same time the movement was directing funds to Richard Nixon’s first campaign for president (also when Escriva made overtures to the Greek Orthodox Church, exploring whether to take his organization out of the Catholic Church). It’s the sort of capture that raises the question of whether Opus Dei is not just loyal to Franco, as Franco himself praised them for, but whether it goes both ways.

It’s especially striking given that, in Gore’s account, Escriva mostly sat out the actual Spanish Civil War—he could have accepted a military chaplaincy or something. In the late 1930s, when the supernumerary tier is rolled out, he explicitly seems to have viewed it as a breeding program: to “foment the multiplication of numerary vocations.”

A common theme of Latin American authoritarianism is this alignment between neoliberal economists and intellectuals on the one hand, and the muscle on the other. As you can see the relationship is sometimes pretty contentious, but it would be to misunderstand Opus Dei to put it on the latter rather than the former side, moving people into various research institutes and policy roles—much the same work that it does today in DC.

This seems fairly important, because Opus Dei had close connections to the Pinochet government, and after Escriva’s death, the group is arguably much more important in the Americas than in the country where it started—helped in part by the movement’s routine avoidance of Spanish currency controls due to its friends in government.

Five months after Escriva died the Bourbons were restored in Spain, and Juan Carlos led the transition to democracy resulting in the constitution of 1978, the same year Karol Wojtyla was elected pope. Gore covers closely the intimate relationship between the prelature and John Paul II—his private secretary was an Opus Dei numerary—but one gets the sense that they are united by anti-communism as much as a conservative interpretation of catholicism.

A lot of this Cold War Catholic history and its relation to the anni di piombo is still being sussed out, there were new disclosures related to the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro just last year by an Italian intelligence veteran. The intrigues of 1982 are somewhat undercovered by Gore. Three things happened that year with huge implications for the Church: the murder of Roberto Calvi, the attempt on John Paul II’s life, and the approval of Opus Dei as the first personal prelature in the history of Roman Catholicism, which Gore writes was done from his hospital bed (prior to that it would have been considered what is called a secular institute), over the objections of the Spanish bishops and the future Benedict XVI, known to have raised a number of issues with the group over the years. Gore writes that they were more or less allowed to write their own rules. Thereafter, Opus Dei was a “prelature,” but it didn’t really have a prelate until Álvaro del Portillo was consecrated a bishop in 1992. There’s just a lot of fudging going on, especially after it was ruled that the intent of personal prelatures in Vatican II was that they be made solely of priests.

Gore’s ending is a little vague, which is forgivable because much of this is still in the balance. The two motu proprio from the pope in the last few years have released Opus Dei members from their obedience, but what happens next is up in the air. If I may venture a guess, a lot of this has to do with money. Roberto Calvi was rumored to have be in contact with Opus Dei about a bailout of the Vatican’s finances, which it may be in need of again, soon. The first one, Gore writes, came with an explicit quid pro quo of Opus Dei gaining a voice in the Vatican’s attitude toward communist countries, and similar strings would likely be attached to a future bailout. Gore writes about the sale of various Opus Dei real estate assets, including a property on Lake Como to LVMH, which may indicate preparations being made there. If that happens, the terms of it will be very important.

Gore’s early history of Opus Dei in the United States is very interesting. They took over at Harvard following the departure of the Jesuit Fr. Leonard Feeney—Gore writes that Opus Dei’s main Spanish banker was in touch with the DNC attorney Sol Rosenblatt, who was bequeathed the entire fortune of a Morgan heir in an inheritance the family disputed, and helped secure an Opus Dei property near Harvard. At one point Cardinal Cushing even ordered Opus Dei to cease all activities at Harvard, but he was ignored.

Their presence at Princeton is substantial—Fr. McClokey began there in 1985, and Robbie George’s Witherspoon Institute and James Madison Program is an important node in the network, with a number of shell foundations run out of the New Jersey town by Luis Tellez. We learn that the Mercer Street house was bought by Opus Dei after the previous owner was found murdered in the basement.

The reason Gore got interested in the subject is the saga of Banco Popular, which collapsed in 2017, but whose dividends underwrote Opus Dei’s expansion for decades. Toward the end there are indications of a power struggle within the bank between two conservative Catholic groups, Opus and the Mexican Legio Christi. Gore is a financial journalist who realized he wasn’t looking at a normal financial scandal. Both in Europe and the U.S., Opus Dei itself avoids scrutiny for its various financial activities due to a legal fiction that it doesn’t control any of it—this is why Pope Francis’s decision to release them from their obedience is important.

Gore is fairly good about making distinctions between what sort of formal control or authority over members is appropriate and normal in a religious order (which Opus Dei is not), and what crosses the line into various kinds of spiritual and other abuse. The fact that its rulebooks are not published—they are actually kept under lock and key—is abnormal. The bugging of Villa Tevere and probably many other residences is rather abnormal. The separation of members from their families is unusual. The elaborate system of censorship for numeraries is deeply strange. Their habit of discouraging confessions to non-Opus Dei priests is concerning and one they have been repeatedly told to knock off by the Vatican. There is an unusually frequent recourse to psychiatric drugs and hospitalization, even in the life of Escriva, with the former in one Spanish case prescribed by supernumerary doctors. If this is a method of forming consciences, it’s an unusually coercive one.

The court case in Argentina centers on minors being recruited from neighboring poorer countries under false pretenses to work as numerary assistants doing manual labor, and it’s a very clear instance of their targeting of children, which has gone on in the United States as well. Manual labor is a normal part of most genuine religious orders, and the separation here has a lot to do with Opus Dei’s sense of itself that it targets people of influence in business and law; they are seen to need help. There have already been a few cases involving the numerary assistant scam, in which all of the women’s wages are turned over. The directors of numerary houses these days are usually priests, but that wasn’t always the case, and that’s where we get into the abnormal phenomenon of lay spiritual direction put to coercive ends. In the early going directors were encouraged to read the incoming mail of residents—a felony in the United States. One of the disturbing things that bears on the conduct of numerary businessmen is this:

Such fabricated letters were a well-known threat that hung over any numerary who traveled abroad, as they were expected to sign several blank sheets of paper before leaving on any trip. Opus Dei members also pushed the line that Ortega had suddenly gone crazy and might cause further public embarrassment for the Caudillo and his regime.

So the line here between business and religious obedience is pretty thin.

Opus Dei has a remarkable ability to do the extraordinary. The period of priestly formation for Fr. McCloskey, a longtime presence in DC, was an abnormally short three years. They clearly had a role in the very rapid canonizations of their founder Josemaria Escriva, which he himself seems to have planned for (his beatification was attended by Giulio Andreotti,), the beatification of his successor Alvaro del Portillo, and have more recently been making noises about an odor of holiness surrounding the late daughter of Leonard Leo.

Gore has a few more details about Cardinal Pell’s closeness to Opus Dei, who was coordinating the committee for the reform of the Vatican’s finances. On the one hand, the charges against him were specious. On the other, Opus Dei’s finances are themselves ugly. And if Opus Dei is aiming for a repeat of their last Vatican bailout, one wonders if he was sort of set up to fail.

The final half of the book is mostly dedicated to the U.S. and recent history, and it’s here that, one hopes, the publication of this book might shake loose some more details. Estate planning is the bread and butter of religious organizations of all kinds, and there are a few specific ones here that raise questions. I find three very interesting. We learn from Gore that the Michigander Wall Street lawyer Edward Link Wyckoff was a supernumerary. He was the estate lawyer for Duke Ellington. The handling of the Sauganash Foundation, in which control of the board was wrested from the Smith family by Opus Dei, seems pretty heavyhanded and tasteless. And then finally and most importantly, there’s the $1.6 billion pile of cash from Barre Seid that Leonard Leo is sitting on top of. We find out here that Eugene Meyer, son of Frank and a founder of FedSoc, initially made the introduction between Seid and Leo, who decided to put the donation to his own purposes.

The bits in the final section taking place in Washington are those with which I am most familiar. I attended Justice Scalia’s funeral Mass, recounted here, at which Justice Thomas read scripture. Much of Opus Dei’s activity is centered on the Catholic Information Center, which hands awards out to either people they’re cultivating for cash or people who have done favors for them, with the first going to the monstrous Cardinal Wuerl. Much of the money for their Trump-era initiatives seems to have been handled by Neil and Ann Corkery. Justice Scalia seems to have been drawn deeply into the Opus Dei orbit, visiting Villa Tevere with his wife. Opus Dei seems to have had the hook-up with the neocon Bradley and Scaife Foundations, arranging funding for Deal Hudson’s Crisis magazine in the early going.

Fr. McCloskey, who was spirited off to London to avoid a sexual misconduct scandal, played a role in the conversions of a number of prominent people including Sen. Brownback, Robert Bork, and Al Regnery. His successor Fr. Arne Panula got close to Peter Thiel and Arthur Brooks, and started the Leonine Forum. The Robert Hanssen espionage case is covered here—his wife was a teacher at the Opus Dei girls’ school Oakcrest, and they were parishioners alongside Louis Freeh, whom we don’t know whether he is a supernumerary or cooperator, but he is certainly a crook, recently working for a sanctioned Israeli oligarch. Clearly another city important to this is Denver, where Jose Gomez begins his episcopal career as the first U.S. Opus Dei bishop, and where a lot of the EWTN activities were based.

Bill Barr and Pat Cippolone, Trump’s AG and White House Counsel, both are closely tied to the CIC. It’s hard to argue a conspiracy here with Trump—Leonard Leo favored the ridiculous Ted Cruz for president in 2016, and Ann Corkery signed a letter opposing him—but they certainly made the most of it, after a meeting between Leo and Trump in Trump Tower. 2017 is obviously another important year for the prelature, with Leo taking over judicial appointments, Larry Kudlow becoming the director of the National Economic Council, and the collapse of Banco Popular.

If I can spare an aside on my favorite topic here, one thing undercovered by Gore is the interactions between the Israelis and Opus Dei. During a lot of this Opus Dei is trying to build a pilgrimage center in Jerusalem, the sort of thing that doesn’t get done without the approval and a quid pro quo from Netanyahu’s gangster government. So quite apart from these people’s conservative orientation, maybe one of the main ways in which a lot of these influential DC Catholics are at odds with the pope is their slavish and unmanly silence in the face of the Holy Father’s calls for a ceasefire. Robbie George especially is known for being a complete pigheaded dolt on this subject. I am more than willing to argue the point about the justice of armed resistance to the Spanish Republic, I am not willing to argue the point here.

There’s the question of what comes next, with the two motu proprio and large sums of money in the balance. For the time being, given that most of the Opus Dei members of influence are being minging little sissies when it comes to opposing an ethnic cleansing, I consider them mostly useless. For heaven’s sake, in what sense is a goofy little parvenu like Leonard Leo competent to have an influence over American culture, Catholic or otherwise—his stated intent with his pile of Chinese cash? Cardinal Gregory would be well within his rights to assert his authority over the Catholic Information Center, and close it down or repurpose it. It would be the right thing to do, and he should do it.