Manipulation, greed and power: The untold story of Opus Dei

“The Work is a danger to itself, to its members, to the Church and to the world,” concludes 43-year-old author Gareth Gore. He writes this in his newly released book Opus, the culmination of the British journalist’s five-year-long investigation into the organization that was founded almost a century ago by a Spanish Catholic priest named Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer.

Gore’s book begins with a confession from his time reporting in Madrid: “[In 2017], I was one of the journalists who covered the collapse of Banco Popular and who — like everyone else — missed the most important part of the story.” Specializing in financial news, he had already covered banking crises in a dozen countries and recounted the fall of the Spanish entity in a similar way.

“But a couple of years later,” he tells EL PAÍS, “I was lucky that my boss sent me back to Spain.”

Gore sits down for an interview with this newspaper in his literary agent’s office, in London’s West End. “What seemed like just another story about the collapse of a bank that had taken on too many risks ceased to be. Nothing made sense.”

The shareholders subsequently tried to recover their money in court. All except for one… and curiously, it was the largest one. “Enigmatically named La Sindicatura (‘the syndicate’),” Gore says, “the group held 10% of the bank when it went bankrupt — a stake valued at more than €2 billion ($2.2 billion) at its peak. However, a few weeks after the bankruptcy, La Sindicatura’s main company notified [the authorities of] its dissolution.”

By following the money trail, the researcher arrived at the lost story, which motivates the full title of his book, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church. In other words, the darkest side of a religious organization that is linked to dozens of educational centers in Spain.

Of the almost 500 pages in the book, about 100 of them are notes, citing sources. Gore interviewed more than 100 current members of Opus Dei, ranging from those in their twenties to those in their nineties. He sat down with them in London, Rome, Madrid, Buenos Aires and New York City. Among his interviewees were “crucial people in decision-making within the organization.” He hopes that his book will be “the beginning of a process to encourage police, judges and governments to investigate the abuses and possible crimes committed by Opus Dei.” He also hopes that these five years of work will serve to “open people’s eyes.”

“For me, the most dangerous thing is how this organization – which recruits children and is based on a system of manipulation – has introduced itself into the educational system. In Spain, the debate revolves around whether the “concertado” schools (private centers that are partly subsidized) should receive public money. But for me, what the Spanish Ministry of Education should be asking itself is: ‘Should Opus Dei be authorized to take charge of the welfare of children?’”

EL PAÍS shares the revelations of the book, which was released on October 1, after speaking with the author in London. An internal Opus Dei memorandum prior to the launch, distributed to the homes of devotees, asks Escrivá to intercede from heaven and for the members of the organization to “pray for all those involved and for all those who may be affected.” The Opus Dei press office issued a statement on Wednesday stating that the book offers a “false picture” of the Work and its founder; it denies the accusations, asserts that its members do not “represent” them in their political or economic activities and that its network of corporations and foundations is in compliance with the law. The non-profits run by members of the organization, they add, seek to “spread the message and spirit of Opus Dei, [doing so] with the conviction that all the baptized [members] are called to be agents of evangelization.”

Luis and Javier Valls-Taberner: Opus Dei and Opus Night

The interview with Javier Valls-Taberner, who was with Banco Popular for more than 40 years, 15 of them as president alongside his brother Luis, “opened this giant Pandora’s box,” Gore explains. “They called us Opus Dei and Opus Night,” the banker revealed to the journalist. Luis, an Opus numerary (a name for celibate members of the group who live at Opus centers and are devoted to the Work) would retire at night to an Opus residence on the outskirts of Madrid, where he would wear a chain with spikes around his thigh to remember the suffering of Christ. Javier, on the other hand, enjoyed “good wine, good food, parties and golf.” It was Luis who made it his goal to take over Banco Popular. The operation involved betraying his own family, since Félix Millet, the bank’s president at the time, was his mother’s first cousin.

The “hijacking” of Banco Popular

The maneuver that Gore describes as “hijacking” the bank to turn it “into an Opus Dei cash machine” and finance its expansion throughout the world was consolidated at the beginning of 1957. Through companies linked to the Work, large blocks of shares were purchased. “The official archives of Banco Popular are peppered with mentions of subsidiary companies [that belong to] Opus Dei,” the book states.

“Without Luis [Valls-Taberner] and the way in which he diverted money from the bank, Opus Dei wouldn’t be what it is today,” Gore emphasizes. “A very important part of the network that it has throughout the world exists thanks to the money that came from Banco Popular. The participation was carried out through a series of shell companies and foundations that operated like a game of Russian dolls, so as to hide their true beneficiary. The money was going from the bank towards recruitment initiatives.” Gore says that a website in which a group of numeraries paid tribute to Valls-Taverner estimated at €700 million the contribution to Opus-related foundations.

When Luis Valls-Taverner became ill and was no longer useful to the Order, the brothers were removed from the bank. Gore recalls: “Javier told me that they barely let him speak to Luis,” who died in 2006. A month later, Javier was fired from the bank and came to fear for his life. “He travelled to London to speak to the Spanish ambassador, a man known for holding a high position in Opus Dei. He asked him to inform Villa Tévere (the Opus Dei headquarters in Rome) that he had incriminating documents in a safe in Switzerland that would come to light if something happened to him or his family.”

The organization’s official statement after the book’s publication states that Luis Valls-Taberner “used part of his remuneration to help initiatives inspired by Opus Dei” and “helped create several foundations, some of which received donations from Banco Popular” that “provided funding to various initiatives promoted by Opus Dei or persons related to it.” Everything was done, the Order insists, “in a transparent and legal manner, and generally in the form of loans that have been repaid.”

Banco Santander took over the financial institution for the symbolic price of one euro in 2017. Still, Banco Popular’s case continues to drag on. This past June, the Criminal Chamber of the Audiencia Nacional, a high court with national jurisdiction, confirmed that former bank president Ángel Ron should be put on trial for defrauding investors and falsifying accounting records during a capital raising operation in 2016. Meanwhile, in neighboring France, a court sentenced an Opus Dei-affiliated foundation — along with two numeraries who worked for it — to pay compensation to a woman who accused them of exploitation.

Expansion in the US and Trump’s agenda

Over the years — especially in the U.S. — Opus Dei made great strides. “In Spain,” Gore explains, “it all came down to Franco. [Opus Dei’s] complicity with his bloody dictatorship was what helped them grow. And, in the U.S. — the most powerful country in the world — Opus Dei has devoted many resources towards increasing its influence. It’s no coincidence that it has flourished in times of deep division and cultural wars. Opus Dei feeds on all that and on misinformation. After the 2020 elections, Pope Francis called for a climate of reconciliation. But what happened at the Catholic Information Center [CIC, an organization that was run by John McCloskey after he quit his job on Wall Street to become an Opus priest] was the opposite: it became a platform for figures close to Donald Trump who questioned the election, a tool to pour more gasoline on the fire.”

The book recounts how, through various foundations and organizations, Opus Dei tries to infiltrate the American power elite: from the House of Representatives and the Senate, to the White House and the Supreme Court. In 2002, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was invited by the Work to participate in a series of conferences in Rome. Speakers stressed the need for Opus Dei members, and Catholics in general, to use their position in society to influence public policy. Santorum declared that, in his public struggle in the US Senate, “the blessed José María [Escrivá]” guided his path. The Republican was one of the sponsors of an amendment to force schools to stop teaching the theory of evolution as a fact.

“Opus Dei,” Gore says, “creates the environment and connects with the right people to bring about legislative changes. The network’s greatest achievement is to have overturned Roe v. Wade (1973)… but that’s only the beginning. If Trump wins in November, it will also be a victory for the network of people linked to Opus Dei in the U.S.”

Escrivá de Balaguer: “love bombing” and “serpentine prudence”

The founder of Opus Dei called Luis Valls-Taberner “my Saint Nicholas,” in allusion to Nicholas of Bari, a saint who was credited with having saved three sisters from prostitution by throwing money out of the window of his house so that their father could marry them off. He eventually became known as Santa Claus (“Saint Nick”).

Escrivá's own father had gone bankrupt when he was 12. The man who would be declared a saint in 2002 had entered the seminary to opt for a better life. He studied law and even applied for a civil service position, but his application was unsuccessful. “Unable to find a decent job in civilian life, he began to look for vacancies in the Church,” the book notes. In 1928, he began to outline the general lines of what Opus Dei would become. At first, the British researcher says, the institution “encompassed ideas such as compassion, forgiveness and charity,” but it soon evolved — on the religious side — into something much more like a sect. Meanwhile, on the political side, it became a lobby group. “A history of manipulation, abuse and greed wrapped in the cloak of sanctity,” Gore sums up.

Escrivá's second manual, Instruction on the manner of doing proselytism, details the methods of recruiting future numeraries, who shall take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. With what he called “serpentine prudence,” he asked followers to go about one by one, to distrust people who asked a lot of questions — and even those who suffered from sleepwalking — and to keep them away from their families. The strategy for making friends is known as “love-bombing,” while Escrivá referred to the first induction ceremony as “slavery.”

EL PAÍS asks Gore if Escrivá might have had a guilty conscience, given that, from the start, there was a desire to conceal his methods.

“Escrivá knew that the system he was designing was unacceptable,” the author responds. “The founding writings have never been shared with the Vatican. There’s a cult-like element [surrounding] Escrivá, along with another element of shame. [There’s] fear that people will see them for what they are. In the case of the supernumeraries (the members who can live with their families), it’s more complicated… but in the case of the numeraries, they function like a sect.”

“They are sanctifying themselves by peeling potatoes”

One of the secrets that Opus tried to preserve was the operation of its residences for numeraries. At first, Escrivá designed a brotherhood of men: “There will never be women, not in a million years, in Opus Dei,” he wrote. But then he admitted female numeraries (with education and money) and, years later, invented the figure of the “numerary servant” — those without credentials — who cleaned and cooked for the numeraries. In the residence where Luis Valls-Taberner lived, the servants entered through different doors as the residents. “Even physical contact between the director [of the male section] and the director [of the female section] wasn’t allowed. Any conversation to coordinate mealtimes or cleaning had to be done over an internal telephone system. For more complicated matters, it was permitted to pass a note under the door, although it had to be typed and unsigned as a safety measure to prevent personal ties from forming,” Gore writes.

The Opus Dei encouraged student members to target fellow male university students in order to “recruit the next generation of civil servants and businessmen,” the researcher explains. “To reach everyone, we first turn to intellectuals, knowing that any attempt to penetrate society passes through them,” wrote the founder of the Work. But the case of the numerary servants was quite different. They were, Gore explains, “women without education, from poor families.” Escrivá felt that this new lower class was vital to creating a more rarefied atmosphere within the residences, since, in this way, the numerary members would feel even more special.” After the first admissions, the founder noted: “The numerary servants — and I say this seriously — seem to me to be the greatest miracle that our Lord has done for his Work. Before, they only peeled potatoes. Now, they are sanctifying themselves by peeling potatoes.”

Gore affirms that Opus Dei is a misogynistic organization. “Today, Opus Dei tries to present itself as an organization where decision-making is democratic and equal, but this is a fiction. Women vote… but what they vote for has to be validated by men later on.”

María del Carmen Tapia, a Spaniard, was sent to one of the Opus Dei residences in Venezuela. There, she suggested some changes, such as allowing everyone to confess to priests from outside the Work. In her courageous memoir Inside Opus Dei: The True, Unfinished Story (2006), which is cited by Gore — Tapia relates that Escrivá made her travel to Italy, where he called her “a huge hypocrite and a bad woman.” At one point, he ordered the representatives of the women’s section to punish Gladys, a Venezuelan who was helping Tapia avoid censorship of her correspondence. “Lift her skirt, pull down her panties and hit her in the ass until she talks.”

Over the years, some of those women dared to denounce what they had experienced. One particular case, which involved 43 former servants in Argentina, would be crucial in attracting the attention of a compatriot. He was the most powerful man in the Church: Pope Francis. The trailblazer, Lucía Giménez, had been recruited by Opus Dei in a town in Paraguay when she was only 13 years old. Flown without documents in a private plane to Buenos Aires, she worked “12-hour shifts, without pay, with breaks only to eat and pray, while sleeping on a wooden board.” When she finally left Opus Dei at 32 years old, she was “a broken woman.”

Regarding this case, the Argentine Federal Court has just charged the highest authorities of Opus Dei in the country with human trafficking and labor exploitation. Gore warns: “I have spoken with several women, many of them recruited when they were just girls, [many of them] Spanish, who have suffered through very similar things. The Spanish authorities should follow the example set by their Argentine colleagues and investigate Opus Dei as a matter of urgency.”

Mortification and banned books

In the residence where the president of Banco Popular lived, “the numeraries had to tie a chain cilice (a spiked belt, used as a self-imposed means of repentance) to their thighs for two hours a day. Once a week, the men were expected to sleep on a wooden board — women did this every night, because they were considered more sensual and so needed to make an extra effort to ward off temptation. On Saturday, further mortification came in the form of the discipline: a cordlike whip that members struck over their shoulders against their back while chanting a prayer to the Virgin Mary,” the book relates. The aim was to isolate and control the tenants completely. Every morning, the director would check the newspapers to cut out any sensitive material. Opus Dei also designed a book rating system, from 1 (can be read by anyone) to 6 (totally banned), to which members of the organization had to adhere. Authors censored with a 6 include Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce and Tennessee Williams. “The Vatican abolished a similar index of books in the 1960s, but Opus Dei still maintains that system,” Gore says.

Suitcases full of money, Operation Lemonade and the fall of Ruiz-Mateos

Gore’s book isn’t the first scandal linked to Opus Dei. In 1964, Richard Cushing, the archbishop who married and buried John Fitzgerald Kennedy, wrote a letter to the head of the organization, asking them to cease all their activities. In 1965, Banco Popular’s man in Lisbon, Gregorio Ortega, a numerary, was arrested in Venezuela with a suitcase full of banknotes. When his hotel room was searched, the police found a quarter of a million dollars. “He had become the main money launderer for Opus Dei,” Gore explains. “By the mid-1960s, 138 auxiliary companies had been formed to generate funds to finance Escrivá's ambitions. Opus Dei had already created a complex system of bank accounts, both in Spain and abroad, in the name of trusted numeraries, so as to avoid [oversight]. But the system wasn’t foolproof: sometimes, the group had to resort to the most basic of means to get money out of Spain.”

Before taking a trip abroad, members were sometimes given a money belt. In 1989, the author continues, “a group of Catholic parents in New York published a book called Parents’ Guide to Opus Dei, detailing the group’s recruitment techniques.” In 2001, FBI agents arrested one member, Robert Hanssen, for spying for the Russians. When they went to search the Hanssen home in New York, Bonnie Hanssen explained that her husband had been doing so since 1979, when she caught him red-handed. She told the FBI agents that she took her husband to confession. According to Bonnie, Father Robert Bucciarelli, an Opus Dei priest, advised Robert that, instead of turning himself in, he should donate the money paid to him by the Russians. In 2002, the star priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei in Washington, D.C., John McCloskey, was accused of sexual misconduct.

EL PAÍS asks Gore why, despite all of these scandals and wakeup calls, there hasn’t been much of an impact on the reputation of Opus Dei, which is almost a century old.

“Almost every conversation began in the same way: with the Opus Dei member explaining that everyone who was part of the organization acted with total freedom and that whatever they did, whether in business, politics, or in general, was on their own initiative and had nothing to do with the Work,” Gore summarizes. “Until now, it’s been very easy for them to wash their hands of it by saying: ‘It was an individual. That’s not the way Opus operates.’ But my book goes to the heart of the organization — to the writings of Escrivá — where a system of manipulation is established. They can no longer say that it was an individual, a rotten apple. It’s all by design. Many people within the Church — including the Pope — are now aware of the danger of Opus Dei. Many others are unaware of the abuses, or are willing to turn a blind eye because they see the organization as an ally in moving the Church towards a more conservative agenda. And the world at large has no idea what the rise of Opus Dei means. They happily send their children to [Opus] schools, thinking, ‘It’s a Catholic organization. What could be wrong with it?’”

Gore supports his thesis with two pieces of information. The first refers to the precautions taken by Pope Francis when he commissioned an investigation into the Vatican’s finances. To try to evade the old guard, investigators were given mobile phones with Maltese numbers (instead of Italian ones) and a private line was set up to send passwords to access encrypted documents. The second is known as Operation Lemonade: a plan to try to water down the scandal that was caused by the release of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), later made into a hit film. According to Gore, Brown’s work linked the organization to “brainwashing” and mentioned, “in addition to the Hanssen spy scandal, the rescue of the Vatican Bank by Opus Dei.” The book was presented as an offense to all Christians, not just to the Work. “Thanks to a shrewd communications strategy, with a [multitude] of interviews and guided tours to show the friendly face of the organization, and the payment of $1 million to silence a victim, they turned lemons into lemonade,” Gore laments. “The money raised by Opus Dei was used to recruit followers and cover up crimes.”

What kind of crimes?

“Specifically, human trafficking,” he replies. “The United Nations defines it as the recruitment, transport, harboring, or receipt of persons by means of threats, force, or coercion for the purpose of exploitation, even if the victim has given their consent. The system of recruitment and transfer of girls and young women who joined Opus Dei with the promise of studying at a hotel-school seems to fit that definition. The authorities should also investigate the possibility that [fraud may be being committed] in the network of companies and foundations that Opus Dei unofficially controls. Opus Dei always protects itself.”

In the book, Gore writes that José María Ruiz-Mateos, a well-known Spanish entrepreneur and an Opus supernumerary, donated almost $10 million to Opus Dei. But when he went to the institution’s leadership to ask them for help with his legal problems — his holding company Rumasa was expropriated by the Spanish government on February 23, 1983 — they let him down.

“Ruiz-Mateos owed so much money to [the government of Spain] and his business was such a financial disaster that Opus Dei couldn’t have done anything… but they took advantage of him. Once you’re no longer useful to them, they have zero interest in your spirituality.”

$40,000 in a McDonalds bag. The Pope is fed up

The relationship between Opus Dei and the Vatican is in crisis mode. Shortly after Fernando Ocáriz was inaugurated as head of the organization, a new scandal broke out. An Argentine numerary who had donated all her income and three apartments to the Work decided to leave. With no money to live on, she asked the prelature to return part of her donations, but Opus Dei refused. When the Pope found out about this, the book details, he ordered her to be compensated. “They gave her $40,000, in cash, in a McDonalds bag,” Gore shrugs.

“A fierce fight is brewing between Opus Dei and the progressive forces within the Church,” the British researcher warns. He’s convinced that the network of conservative politicians and judges in the United States is willing to implement an ultra-conservative societal agenda and that the secretive group is clearly betting on the imminent arrival of another Pope.

“Everything depends on how long Francis lives and how much appetite he has for that battle. “Opus Dei has many allies in the Church.”

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