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"Leopards In The Temple" by John Martin
(excerpt)

Yet, as a number of Escriva intimates have testified, there was a much less attractive side. Miguel Fisac, a leading Spanish architect and one of the early Opus Dei numeraries (he remained one from 1936 to 1955), remembers an Escriva who "spoke well of no one," had so exalted a view of his mission that he was "completely convinced that he had been chosen by God to reform the Church," and who was not above insisting on a considerable degree of splendor in his surroundings, and especially in the mother house in Rome: "Millions and millions of pesetas were invested in luxuries of low artistic quality, but in the Renaissance manner, because all of these frivolous details were of the greatest importance to him." [12]

Nor did Escriva belong to that tribe of Catholic pathfinders who take a special interest in those at poverty level. "During the time I knew him," Fisac comments, "I never saw him with any poor people." As a postscript, he tells the story of a former high school companion who came to him (Fisac) to ask for money to help with his family's desperate financial situation: "I told him to come back the next morning as I could not make that decision myself. I consulted my director and he absolutely forbade me to give him anything. He himself was forbidden to consent by the spirit of Opus Dei."[13]

For these and similar reasons, Fisac felt "morally obligated" to testify before the beatification tribunal. To his surprise, he found his testimony wasn't wanted. He is convinced the tribunal eliminated him from consideration simply because "they knew my appraisal was going to be first hand and completely objective, and I was not going to stop to think whether what I said favored or hindered the case." Fisac's charge is echoed by Kenneth Woodward, religion editor of Newsweek and a persistent Opus Dei critic who refers to its members as the "Mormons" of Catholicism. In a 1992 article, he asserted that Opus Dei had sufficient influence on the tribunal to prevent critics of Escriva from testifying. Woodward was later to say: "It seemed as if the whole thing was rigged. They (Escriva's supporters) were given priority, and the whole thing was rushed through." [14]

Another Escriva intimate whose testimony didn't make it beyond the security guards, so to speak, was Spain's Maria Carmen del Tapia, head of Opus Dei's female section in Venezuela and at one time Escriva's secretary. She was summoned to Rome in 1965 for such breaches of discipline as allowing the women under her to go to the Opus Dei priest of their choice and for complaining about the amount of direction coming from Rome. Ultimately, Escriva obliged her to resign, but before that final answer, she reported feeling the full wrath of outraged authority: for eight months she was kept under what amounted to house arrest in Rome, allowed no contact with the outside world by telephone or mail, and refused permission to return to her family in Spain. Escriva, she reports, had concluded for his own mysterious reasons that she'd had physical relations with not one but two Opus Dei priests. At her tumultuous expulsion hearing, she quotes him thus: "You are a wicked woman! A lost woman! Mary Magdalene was a sinner, but you? You are a seductress! Leave my priests alone! Hear me well! Whore! Sow!" [15] A number of years later, in an account that appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, she commented, "My astonishment is infinite when I hear now that Monsignor Escriva is in the process of beatification." [16]

A third whose testimony was zealously ignored was the eloquent John Roche who, as a graduate student at Oxford in 1972 (he'd then been an Opus Dei member for 13 years), concluded that "the ethos of Opus Dei was entirely self-centered, sectarian, and totalitarian, and that it was misleading the Church about important aspects of its character." [17] Following his resignation in 1973, he became one of its most articulate critics and in 1979 persuaded the august London Times to take a reportorial interest. The Times subsequently printed a profile of the organization and called for an investigation into its practices. The most impressive result was that England's Cardinal Hume, for one of the few times any Church figure has ever been bold enough to look at Opus Dei without fear and trembling, actually did something. In 1981, he published guidelines that obliged Opus (in England only, of course) to discontinue its practice of the secret recruitment "of children under 18, to allow its members to receive outside spiritual direction, and to allow them to leave if they wanted to." If those guidelines are still followed in England, it's probably still the only place on earth where Opus Dei has to deal with any authority except its own.

In any case, just before calling it quits at Opus Dei, Roche photocopied some 140 editorials from Cronica, Opus Dei's chief internal magazine. They leave little doubt about how serious and single-minded Escriva was in pursuing his dream of an ever-expanding prelature. Here are a few samples:

"Go out to the highways and byways and push those whom you find to come and fill my house, force them to come in; push them…we must be a little crazy…you must kill yourselves for proselytism." [18]

"There is not a single man on earth, a single soul to whom God has not sent us…our inheritance is the whole world…all the seas belong to us…" [19]

"As Jesus received his doctrine from the Father, so my doctrine is not mine but comes from God and so not a jot or title shall ever be changed." [20]

If this is not outright Napoleonic megalomania, it's certainly a novel form of humility -- especially in someone supposedly giving off the rose-scented odor of sanctity. Humanum est errare -- but if your doctrine comes pure and entire from God Himself? Is even hubris a strong enough word?

Another awkward item for those who choose to look at Escriva through saint-colored glasses is the curious business of his having sought and gained a title of nobility. Nor was this some youthful indiscretion. Escriva was a full 66 years old in 1968, when he petitioned for and was granted the title of Marques de Peralta. [21] Though he insisted it was only a form of belated recompense to his family for their sacrifices in preparing him for the ministry, it seemed all too consistent with some earlier behavior in the department of status-seeking: in 1940, he had upgraded the family name in tone and texture by adding the four euphonious syllables of "de Balaguer" (the Catalan town where his family may have originated) to the rather plain Es-cree-VAH. [22] In any event, as Michael Walsh writes in his book on the society, this concern with name and rank "would seem to be untypical of someone whose fundamental humility is among the virtues his supporters list as his case proceeds for canonization…particularly in the light of his spiritual treatise Camino (The Way): 'Honors, distinctions, titles, things of air, puffs of pride, lies, nothingness.'"

Footnotes:

12. An Interview with Miguel Fisac, Opus Dei Awareness Network, Inc., 2000, p. 27.
13. Ibid, p. 30.
14. Martin, James. "Opus Dei in the United States," America, 25 February 1995, p. 9.
15. del Tapia, Maria Carmen. Crossing the Threshold: A Life in Opus Dei. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997, p. 277.
16. Walsh, op. cit., p. 155.
17. Roche, John J. "The Inner World of Opus Dei: Evidence from Internal Documents of Opus Dei and testimony." Linacre College, Oxford. 15 June 1982.
18. Cronica, iv, 1971.
19. Cronica, iv 1964.
20. Cronica.
21. Walsh, op. cit., pp. 14-15.
22. Fisac, op. cit., p. 12.

Ad Orientem
Wednesday, October 02, 2002

by Mark C. N. Sullivan

"Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain. . . Glorified be pain!" Josemaria Escriva, The Way

A Procession of Flagellants, Goya

Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva, to be made a saint Oct. 6, is said to have been so fierce in beating himself with a cord-like whip called a "Discipline" that he routinely spattered the bathroom walls with blood.

The Opus Dei movement Escriva launched is today seen in the vanguard of the Catholic Church's New Evangelization, and is influential from Rome to K Street.

Yet certain devotional practices of the society remain positively medieval. These exercises in corporal mortification include wearing for two hours a day a spiked chain called a “Cilice” that breaks the skin around the upper thigh, and beating oneself 33 times once a week with the “Discipline.”

Opus Dei members interviewed by the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper said whipping is a form of suffering for God.

Martinez was put off by reading that Escriva whipped himself until he bled when she began looking into Opus Dei. “When I read that, I didn’t understand, because I always thought God gave me my body and he wants me to take care of it,” she said.

When she raised the issue with her Opus Dei spiritual director, he said that some people are called to emulate the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Others are not.

Suffering and sacrifice aren’t unusual in modern culture, said Hefferan, citing the grimaces she often sees on the faces of joggers in the morning. But most people do it for themselves, she said, while Opus Dei members do it for God.

“Sacrificing for God is the foreign idea,” she said.

Reporter Isambard Wilkinson of the Telegraph raised the issue of self-flagellation in this highly readable take on Opus Dei:

SHORTLY after I arrived in Madrid, long before other religious organisations knew of my existence, I received a telephone call from an Opus Dei official.

"You may not know who we are," he said in a consciously unthreatening voice. "But would you like to come and have an informal discussion about things?"

Sipping sherry in the organisation's press office in Madrid, I quickly appreciated what the message was. "You will hear all sorts of inaccurate theories about Opus Dei. We have no political influence at all. There is nothing strange about us," said Luis Gordon, Opus Dei's press officer.

Most Spaniards will tell you that Opus Dei is mysterious but offer very little information on what the organisation does. Most prefer merely to shudder at the mention of its name.

According to its critics, Opus Dei is a secretive and conservative religious order of well-placed people who form a near-Masonic shadowy influence behind Spain's political and financial elite.

Opus Dei's swiftly expanding influence at the heart of the Vatican makes it an obvious target for conspiracy theories. That is perhaps unsurprising as the group is known to favour practices with more than a whiff of the medieval - including the wearing of cilicios, pointed chains which dig into the thigh, or self-flagellation with a five-tailed whip while chanting the Salve Maria.

The Opus Dei man has a timeless take on the issue: "Do you like pretty women? So do I. Do you know what effort they make to get a nice figure, and increase their height with high heels - this is a very hard mortification, much more than a cicilio.

"Why does society accept this terrible mortification and then is scandalised when people do it for God?" asked Mr Gordon.

An entertaining feature in The Economist 10 years ago on old-boy networks from Skull and Bones to the Trilateral Commission looked at Opus Dei:

THE Jesuits have been around longer, but Opus Dei is rapidly supplanting the older, more intellectual order as a powerful elite at the heart of the Catholic Church. Although the organization is fairly secretive, it received unprecedented publicity earlier this year when 150,000 members descended on Rome for the beatification of the organisation's founder, Monsignor Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer.

Opus Dei (literally, the work of God) originated in Spain in 1928, but has now spread its network through 80 countries. Many of its members are recruited at school and university. Although only 2% of Opus Dei members are priests, the organisation's adherents dedicate themselves to prayer and self-discipline. The real masochists live in residencies run by the Opus Dei, where they practise self-flagellation and wear uncomfortable spikes on the inside of their trousers. But most members of the society live outwardly normal lives and keep their membership of Opus Dei a secret, even from close friends and relatives.

Outsiders hoping to identify members of Opus Dei must look for tell-tale signs. Somewhere in the house of most members will be a small model of a donkey, representing the ass that Christ used to enter Jerusalem. A whiff of Atkinson's cologne, the favourite of Escriva, is also a giveaway.

The canonization ceremonies Oct. 6 no doubt will see Rome awash in asses and Atkinson's.

The Flagellants, photogravure after the painting by Carl Marr