It's been a marathon effort but I have finally finished reading John Allen's 400-page examination of Opus Dei. I suppose the biggest overall question that I think about in my own conclusion is the one of: "Has John Allen's examination and presentation of the evidence changed my opinions?" My answer is that, in some respects, yes it has. I do think, in the big picture, John Allen does present compelling evidence that Opus Dei, as an organisation, is not the monster it has been portrayed to be in the popular press or in the ways it has acquired a level of demonisation in critical circles within the Catholic Church. There are in fact many things that appeal to me in the Opus Dei spirituality and religous outlook. At the end of all the analysis though I think Opus Dei suffers from one enormous negative. This negative is so substantial that I would never want to be a member of Opus Dei and, ultimately, I think it is the flaw that lies at much of the heart of the institutional church's problems in losing the allegiance of so many in the modern world.

John L. Allen. Mr Allen is also NCR's highest profile reporter and commentator

Before I discuss that criticism though let me first present to you a summary of what John Allen's book examines. In the final chapter he presents a 15 point summary of the evidence he has examined in detail in the earlier chapters of his book. I believe this is both an accurate summary of the evidence and I do believe the earlier evidence he has presented in the body of the book does indeed point to the conclusions he draws. Here are the opening sixteen paragraphs to the concluding chapter where John Allen presents his conclusions in dot-point form...

John Allen's conclusions...

THE FUTURE OF OPUS DEI

It's time to draw some conclusions. What can one say, in summary form, in response to the typical questions that most people ask about Opus Dei, the most controversial force in the Catholic Church?

• Many of the charges leveled against the founder of Opus Dei, Saint Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer-such as his alleged fiery temper, his vanity, and his disillusionment with the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council-are open to multiple interpretations, and in any event do not seem disqualifying in terms of personal sanctity. If they were, many other famous saints of the Church would have to be removed from the rolls. Other charges seem overdrawn, at least as usually formulated. Escriva was not, for example, "pro-Franco"; the most that can be said is that he was not "anti-Franco," either.
• The ideals that Escriva bequeathed to Opus Dei - such as sanctification of work, contemplation in the middle of the world, Christian freedom, and divine filiation - seem promising elements of sound Christian spirituality. Even if there is at times an overweening cult of personality around Escriva, these are principles that for too long had been buried under clericalist and dualistic debris.

	The cover to John Allen's book on Opus Dei.

• Opus Dei is not especially "secretive." Opus Dei's officers and the locations of its centers are matters of public record, its activities are registered under relevant civil laws, and its information offices will answer virtually any question one huts to them. The fact that they do not answer a limited number of questions-most prominently, who's a member and who isn't-makes Opus Dei secretive no more than Alcoholics Anonymous. Other groups in the Church, such as secular institutes, also have policies of discretion about membership. Over the years there has been a steady progress toward greater levels of openness. The early controversies in Spain in the late 1930s and 1940s, when Opus Dei was accused of Masonry, bizarre rituals, and heresy, combined with the problems in the 1950s and 1960s of fitting Opus Dei into Church law, explain much of its traditional reticence.
• Practices of corporal mortification, whatever one makes of them, are not unique to Opus Dei. They have a long pedigree and accepted theological rationale, and do not generally seem to be taken to extremes. When there are exceptions, Opus Dei spokespersons make no bones about saying they were mistakes.
• Women in Opus Dei do not, for the most part, feel like "second-class citizens." In some cases there is a rather "traditional" understanding of gender roles, but the kind of person attracted to Opus Dei by and large is already comfortable with that vision. While ultimate authority inside Opus Dei rests with ordained men, the same is true of the Catholic Church in general. That aside, the women of Opus Dei have their own system of governance that in practice makes them quasi-autonomous. Female numeraries and supernumeraries around the world hold positions as lawyers, architects, journalists, and university professors. Numerary assistants, who do the cooking and cleaning for Opus Dei centers, do not seem to feel oppressed; they see their role as being "mothers" to the Opus Dei family.
• Opus Dei is not rich, at least by the standards of other organizations in the Catholic Church, and certainly when compared to giant multinational corporations. With exactitude, we can fix their total American assets at $344 million, and their assets in the United Kingdom at $72 million. (Opus Dei would not accept this consolidated figure because it does not "own" its various works; individual members and their boards of directors do.) Using the American and English figures as a baseline, we can estimate worldwide assets at $2.8 billion. To put these numbers in context, the United States bishops estimate the revenue of the American Catholic Church alone to be $102 billion. General Motors in 2003 reported assets of $455 billion. Opus Dei ranks in terms of wealth as a midsized American diocese.
• The profile of Opus Dei as "elitist" has some historical validity, given Escriva's interest in evangelizing the intellectual and professional classes. Yet Opus Dei is not "elitist" in the sense in which people often invoke the term, meaning an exclusively white-collar phenomenon. Among its members are barbers, bricklayers, mechanics, and fruit sellers. Most supernumeraries are living ordinary middle-class lives, struggling to pay the bills and afford college tuition for their kids. There are some well-heeled Opus Dei members, but they are not typical. In Canete, Peru, for example, I met a supernumerary named Isabel Charun, whose tiny two-room house for her large family doesn't even have a complete roof in the bedroom. Charun's circumstances are typical of a broad swath of Opus Dei members, especially in the developing world.
• Opus Dei's is not an exclusively vertical spirituality; it does have a social conscience. Many of its corporate works are aimed at helping the poor, from the Kimlea School for girls in Kenya, which teaches low-income girls from coffee and tea plantations basic trade skills, to the Valle Grande Rural Institute in Peru, which helps impoverished farmers protect biodiversity and get indigenous crops to market. What Opus Dei does not do, in an institutional way, is involve itself in struggles for social justice.
• Opus Dei is not "taking over" the Catholic Church. As of December 2004 there were 20 members of Opus Dei who worked in the Vatican, as compared to 26 for their historical rivals, the Jesuits. Opus Dei members occupy 3.6 percent of policy-making positions in the Vatican, mostly at the middle levels. The 41 Opus Dei bishops represent a tiny fraction, 0.9 percent, of the more than 4,000 Roman Catholic bishops in the world.
• Opus Dei itself, as an organization, claims to have no agenda for Catholicism. Members, however, tend to lean right on many theological and liturgical matters. The intellectual Rubicon to be crossed is this: Can teaching presented as authoritative by Church officials be wrong? If a Catholic answers "yes" to that question, he or she is unlikely to feel comfortable in Opus Dei, where there is a strong emphasis on "thinking with the Church."
• Opus Dei, as an organization, has no "line in secular politics, either, and in fact one finds members of Opus Dei on all sides of many questions. Yet when it comes to abortion, divorce, gay marriage, and stem cell research, one will almost always find Opus Dei members on the right, since these are matters on which there is a clear "official" Catholic position. In that sense, the current fixation on these issues may distort the genuine pluralism that exists in Opus Dei on other matters.
• Opus Dei is not the voracious recruiting machine of myth, given the snail's pace of recent growth, averaging 650 new members per year worldwide the last four years. Most Opus Dei-affiliated institutions are lucky to generate one new member a year, out of the hundreds of people the institution might serve. While there have been episodes of excessive pressure applied to young recruits, these seem more characteristic of the past than the present and have not been so strong as to dissuade many people from saying "no."
• For the majority of Opus Dei members who are supernumeraries, there are very few instruments of control. For the 20 percent of members who are numeraries and live in Opus Dei centers, there is a higher degree of structure, an expectation of consultation with superiors, and prudential judgments about what's appropriate matter for reading and entertainment that some outsiders would find stifling. There's little evidence, however, that unwilling people are being subjected to this regime through "mind control." Most members who find the structure excessive simply leave.
• A substantial number of ex-members of Opus Dei, enough to suggest that they are more than isolated cases, report feeling damaged by their experience. While the nature of their complaints varies, the most serious charge is that these members felt manipulated into making a commitment to Opus Dei, pressured into sustaining it, and subjected to demands they found excessive. These reports suggest the need for care in vocational discernment, especially among the young.
• Given the zeal that accompanies a vocation in Opus Dei, sometimes individuals may come on too strong in terms of "recruiting" or oversight, exerting pressure or showing insufficient understanding for human weakness. Some of the critical testimony of ex-members comes down to the failure of certain officials of Opus Dei to use good judgment. As time goes on and Opus Dei matures, these episodes seem less frequent, and the internal climate seems more open. It's less common, though not impossible, to find critical ex-members who left Opus Dei in 2004, as opposed to the mid-1960s or mid-1980s.

What I find attractive in the spirituality and religious outlook of Opus Dei

There are, honestly, elements in the spiritual outlook of Saint Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, which I find personally deeply attractive. Religion, or spirituality, in the Opus Dei mindset is not some "optional extra" in life — something one just does on Sundays as some kind of insurance policy in case the stories about heaven and hell do turn out to be true. Escriva takes the first commandment seriously. God is at the centre of our lives, and at the origin and centre of All Life, and at the heart of the Opus Dei outlook is this recognition of the centrality of this proposition to any system of thought, theology or philosophy that endeavours to make life sensible and ultimately meaningful.

	Richard Dawkins — the planet's best-known atheist

Last night on television in Australia we were treated to the views of the planet's best known atheist, Richard Dawkins — and as testimony to the interest his views are gaining in society — one of Australia's leading broadsheet newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, this morning carries a major article further exploring what Dawkins had to say last night on the Compass program on ABC TV. In addition to all of that, the weekend's other major broadsheet newspaper in this land, The Australian, carried an equally substantial feature story featuring the views of the world's No 2 public atheist, Christopher Hitchens (not available online). These two gentlemen probably represent the polar opposite to the mindset that infuses "The Work" of Opus Dei.

Funnily enough I find myself in both agreement with Dawkins and with Josemaria Escriva. The single most challenging criticism that could be directed at Dawkins' program last night is a simple question: "and just who, or what, Mr Dawkins, do you think was the genius who thought up 'natural selection' or the entire process of evolution that helps us explain so elloquently why life is as we experience it today?" Did this all simply come about by chance? By some "tumble of some cosmological dice?"

Educated in the scientific frame of reference myself I remain extremely comfortable with the idea that faith and reason ride hand-in-hand. I do not believe in some "God of the Gaps". I do not believe that religion and spirituality are some "optional extra" to life. I do believe this Mystery, who is the ultimate source of evolution itself and all that flows from it, is the origin, the centrepoint and ultimate destination of Life and literally "everything we know and are ever likely to know". Josemaria Escriva I believe from what little I know about him, would also share this outlook — and passionately.

What I am deeply attracted to in the founding proposition of Opus Dei then is this vision of placing God at the centre of literally everything we do, and think, in our lives. Opus Die encourages us to bring God to the centre of all our thoughts and actions and it encourages us to take this centrepoint out into the world in all those secular endeavours we need to be necessarily involved in for survival, for meaning, and what that insightful psychologist, Abraham Maslow, called "self-actualisation".

At the same time, I do not believe religion or spirituality ought to be some "obsessive" behaviour. The invitation God extends to us to participate in the Creative Plan is not some invitation to a form of psychiatric derangement. It is not some neurosis or mental sickness we are invited to take on and exhibit. Again, at least in the underlying theology and spirituality that undergirds the Opus Dei outlook, I do think that, at its very best and in the minds of those who really do understand what Josemaria Escriva was endeavouring to get at, there is a recognition of this. "The Work" is something that followers of Opus Dei are invited to take on in a psychologically and spiritually "balanced" way. The invitation is to "integrate" our spirituality and theology into the wholeness of life and through that to sanctify both life, and Life. God is neither viewed as some "God of the Gaps" in the sense that God fills the holes where scientific insight is deficient, neither is God presented as some "God of the Gaps" to fill the holes in our personalities and neuroses. We are not invited to "love, worship and obey" God as some substitute "filling the holes" of all the deficencies in our mental, physical or emotional capacities. God is this "origin and destination of life" whom we are given the choice of inviting into our lives not to "fill the gaps" of our deficiencies, but as the one who helps us trasncend and grow through our deficencies.

Baptism or "becoming Christian" or "becoming religious" seems to be seen by many in the world as some kind of invitation to becoming some kind of "spiritual nerd". It seems to be interpreted as some kind of invitation to start running around as a goody-two shoes proclaiming to everyone about you, "look at me, look at me, look how I know everything and look how I'm obeying all the rules (and you're not!)". It seems to be interpreted as some game of regression not to the "child-like" mind-set that Jesus Christ invites his followers into but to the childishness, naivety and the emotional and intellectual immaturity of kindergarten tots. Again, at its very best, I pick up from John Allen's book, that Opus Dei at its intellectual and spiritual heart does not encourage such an outlook. At its very best I believe the spirituality of Opus Dei is a mature and balanced spirituality. Followers are invited to make God the centre of their entire lives — both in its human and divine dimensions which are seen as integrated and not separate dimensions much as the human and divine dimensions of Jesus Christ are not separate but integrated. At the same time they are not encouraged to run around trying to attract attention to themselves by nerdy or goody-two-shoes behaviour that is trying to say "look at me, look at me, look at what a complete idiot I am" in much the same way that Kath in that cutting television series "Kath and Kim" is constantly running around after her daughter saying "look at me, look at me".

So what is there to criticise?

My major criticism

Christopher Hitchens — mounting what is essentially a straw-man argument. Many Christians and religious people would in fact agree with the forms of religious belief he and Richard Dawkins are seeking to criticise.

In two phrases: "much" and "a lot of what Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were endeavouring to lambast about religion in the newspapers and on television yesterday".

Let me explain what I mean...

Up in that 15 point dot-point summary that John Allen provides you will read at dot-point number 10 these words. I believe they lay at the heart of the Opus Dei problem, and indeed, at the heart of all the problems the Church in the Modern World is experiencing...

The intellectual Rubicon to be crossed is this: Can teaching presented as authoritative by Church officials be wrong? If a Catholic answers "yes" to that question, he or she is unlikely to feel comfortable in Opus Dei, where there is a strong emphasis on "thinking with the Church."

Is the invitation God invites the human individual and the human family into an invitation to worship and obey some fallible human structure, or is it an invitation to worship and obey this Mystery we try to condense into the wholely inadequate word, "GOD" — and which our human institutions should serve as a means and guide to helping us facilitate that worship and obedience?

There is a subtle difference as to where this "rubicon", as Allen lables it, is located. It's a razor edge subtlety — a micron, or nano-second in width — where the infallibility of the Church turns from something laudable into something that is in fact idolatrous and exceedingly wrong and immoral. It in fact begins to lead us away from the Divine — away from this Mystery and Source of the Absolute that we define with the descriptor "God".

I do not believe Josemaria Escriva got this element of his thinking correct. At heart I believe why 85% of the educated peoples in the affluent regions of this planet have walked away from the institutionalised Church is because deep down in their hearts they no longer believe the institutional Church is "infallible" in the ways it self-proclaims itself to be in practice. The rise of individuals like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and what these newspaper articles in recent days describe as "militant atheism" is another sign that the "way forward" is not going to be via any conceptions of religion and spirituality that attempt to supplant themselves for God. Who believe they have all the answers and which attempt to put themselves forward as substitute for the only Absolute that, at the end of everything, is the only Absolute that truly does matter.

I believe we — the educated, reasoning peoples of the Western world, who are rapidly being joined by the masses in the developing world — hunger for structures and "spiritual guides" who can humbly lead us to the Absolute, the Truth and the Love which is ultimately only found in this Mystery which, or who, sits at the very heart of each of our lives and of All Life. They increasingly abhor nerds and "little men and women" who set themselves up under banners of false humility trying to pretend that they are God, or they can read God's mind better than anyone else. They respect people who are prepared to admit when they are wrong and who are prepared to correct their transgressions against the being and souls of other people. They abhor bullies as much as they abhor sentimentality and superstition dressed up as though it is Truth or some kind of Gnostic form of special privilege or "choseness".

At the end of everything God does not call us to be constantly reciting the Ten Commandments. God calls us to exhibit how we understand and apply the Decalogue, and all the great moral insights humankind has slowly discerned and had revealed to them down through time, in the nitty-gritty decisions of lived life. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens ought be praised for their criticisms. There is much to be criticised even if, in the final analysis, the real object of their spleen is not God, or authentic faith and religious belief, but these myriad of heresies, sentimentalities and emotive substitutes that blacken the name of God and the real meaning of the word "religious faith".

My broad conclusions...

I believe Opus Dei, in its broad outlook of endeavouring to integrate the Divine into the wholeness of This Life, is commendable. At the "rubicon" though I believe it fails because it's founder was not able to articulate that razor edge assessment we all need to make where worship and obedience to an institution or structure that is meant to be a guide towards God becomes worshipped and obeyed as some kind of substitute for God.

John Allen's book is highly readable and he does present a substantial body of evidence to back up his conclusions which, in the balance, are slightly different to mine although I think he does at least identify the major challenge facing the institutional Church, and its agencies like Opus Dei, even if I believe he underplays its significance.

Photo Credits:
The photo of Josemaria Escriva used in the headlines shot is taken from http://web.mac.com/cicdc/iWeb/KStreet/Images/pr_saintjos2.jpg. The image of Josemaria has been lifted from the original image and set against a new out of focus crowd scene that is in better proportion to our standard headline dimensions.
Photo of Richard Dawkins: www.edge.org/documents/archive/images/lg/dawkins1028.jpg
Photo of Christopher Hitchens: Crédito: Walter Craveiro — www.flip.org.br/images_download/CHRISTOPHER_HITCHENS%20(4).jpg
 

Brian Coyne is the editor and publisher of Catholica Australia.

We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum.

Brian Coyne can be contacted at: Brian Coyne <editor@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Brian Coyne

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