Book Review: Opus (2024) by Gareth Gore

 

BOOK REVIEW: OPUS (2024) BY GARETH GORE

Reading through Gore’s engrossing accounts of the wheeling and dealing of this secretive organization, one is struck by the stupefying levels of financial and material venality on one hand and the relative banality of Escriva’s program of spirituality on the other. This is not simply Gore’s assessment. The great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar once dismissed Escriva’s The Way as the spiritual equivalent of a guidebook for senior scouts.

If Gore’s assessments are accurate, the whole point of establishing Opus Dei from the beginning seems to have been for its founder’s material and spiritual aggrandizement. And the movement’s devotion to secrecy seems to have grown out of its founder’s lifelong predilection for furtiveness, dissembling, and dishonesty—which Escriva was never shy about encouraging in his writings.

Many Catholics of various political ideologies do seek for ways to live out their faith in their everyday work and life, as Opus Dei preached they should do. If there’s a moral here for those of us looking for ways to integrate these different areas of our life, maybe it is a warning: Money and power can undermine and corrupt even the best spiritual intentions.

https://uscatholic.org/articles/202411/how-opus-dei-manipulated-its-way-into-power/

—John W. Farrell, How Opus Dei manipulated its way into power,” U.S. Catholic, November 8, 2024

“Catholic Mormons”—Kenneth Woodward

Possibly, the best book so far that integrates many of the principal questionable, objectionable, unethical, and morally reprehensible attributes of a global Roman Catholic institution made powerful under the reign of Saint (sainted?) John Paul II, our just recently strongly authoritarian archconservative traditionalist. Critically, Gore includes in his holistic and coherent historical account insider information kept secret and inaccessible for decades by an organization continually obsessed with screwing a tight lid over its jar of sectarian doctrines and censurable shenanigans.

What Gore lacks in theology he more than makes up for in facts. After all, theology is hardly his expertise—he is a financial journalist, reputable and competent, evidently a man of integrity besides. We have to understand that the rationalization underlying the Opus Dei cult is Roman Catholic theology, so that to obtain a fuller understanding of what is problematic—indeed, according to Opus Dei practice, intransigently occult—in its sectarian theology, or more accurately, spiritual theology, we have to access other sources. In this respect, I highly recommend Opus Dei as Divine Revelation (2016) by E. B. E.

Unfortunately, the entire problematic theology of Opus Dei has not yet been adequately investigated, the result being that the institution will continue to propagate its harmful and destructive doctrines, at least until the Roman Catholic hierarchy takes appropriate action, long overdue. In the meantime, Opus Dei will continue to spread its subtly pernicious cancer throughout the Roman Catholic Church, tares multiplying with the wheat.

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Gore’s account insofar as it truthfully recapitulates Opus Dei’s ethos accurately reflects my nightmare experience inside Opus Dei. His story brings to life the hothouse internal culture I had to endure. In Opus Dei Escriva was worshipped like God…he still is.

To Gareth Gore I say FAN-TAS-TIC JOB.

John Allen, Jr. you can trash. Allen contributed to broadcasting “The Beautiful Lie.” It’s hard to believe anyone still pays attention to his garbage book.

At last, I said to myself, a holistic truthful account of the dark side of Opus Dei. That it took so long for someone to put it together attests to the defining secrecy of the cult besides the oppressive hangover issuing from John Paul II’s pontificate.

Now two popes removed, the saint bestowed blinding shine on Opus Dei like that of a maniacally polished hood ornament.

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“The principal things that drive Opus Dei are the cult-like worship of the founder and its own expansion [boldface mine]. Its methods and practices have corrupted the outlook of even its own leadership, which has time and time again proven unwilling and unable to reform, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence of abuse and coercion in its ranks. Opus Dei is a danger to itself, its membership, the Church, and the world.”

—Gareth Gore, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church (2024), page 12