How Opus Dei sought financing from Franco: An ‘economic sacrifice in the service of God, the Fatherland and the New State’

July 14, 1952. Álvaro del Portillo, one of the first members of Opus Dei and the priest who would later replace the organization’s founder, Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, following his death in 1975, writes to the dictator Francisco Franco: “Your Excellency, I have come from Rome with the sole purpose of requesting an audience with Your Excellency, but, given the lateness of the summer, I fear I will not be able to have the great honor and joy of visiting you to speak about our work and projects and to explain to you many other things that Your Excellency, as a good son of the Church and natural Lord of the Spanish people, would be of interest to you. I would like to address this letter to you.” The document, provided to EL PAÍS by British researcher Gareth Gore, author of Opus, has a specific objective that Escrivá de Balaguer’s right-hand man arrives at after a few detours: to ask for money.

In the letter, Del Portillo describes the previous contacts between Escrivá de Balaguer and Franco, who, as he notes, had already expressed “several times” his “sincere desire” to help Opus Dei. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, the founder of the organization swapped his cassock for a worker’s blue overalls, put on his father’s wedding ring, took refuge in eight different houses, and even hid in a mental asylum. He was afraid of being killed like other men of the cloth. Del Portillo, an engineer whom Escrivá de Balaguer had convinced to join the priesthood, accompanied him during part of this flight. But Franco’s victory created, Gore explains, “the perfect conditions” for the expansion of Opus Dei. On the one hand, he “made religious classes compulsory and encouraged religious orders to create residences where students could be supervised. The measures played in favor of Opus Dei’s “Work of God” and its previous experience in the management of student residences.” Escrivá de Balaguer, who was canonized as a saint in 2002, was well aware of what such a push would mean. In a letter to the priest Ricardo Fernández Vallespín, a member of Opus Dei, dated in Madrid on April 27, 1939, he wrote: “I believe that we will have to bless the war.”

“Opus Dei,” Gore says, “had absolutely no qualms about approaching a regime that had murdered tens of thousands of its political opponents during peacetime. Instead of denouncing the dictatorship for its deeply anti-Christian actions, it decided to approach the regime, offering its services to quell subversive elements and factory workers. Escrivá flattered the brutal dictator, who in turn considered the founder of Opus Dei to be ‘very loyal.’” The publication of the British researcher’s book, and the recent decision by the Argentine justice system to indict the organization’s top officials in the country for human trafficking and exploitation, have cornered Opus Dei after a succession of scandals during its nearly 100-year history.

In his letter to Franco, Del Portillo proposes “a simple formula that does not represent any burden on the public treasury” and can greatly help Opus Dei, an organization that, as he reminds him, carries out “discreet and quiet” work, the “most effective” — he says — to “put ideas in order.” “We are setting up,” he explains to the dictator, “some high schools, some vocational training institutes for university students and postgraduates, and it is our desire to start up as soon as possible in the castle of Peñíscola, which the state gave us in usufruct, a center of high culture where intellectuals from all over the world, even non-Catholics, can come to live together in a Spanish and Christian environment.”

Escrivá’s right-hand man at that time adds that Opus Dei has also begun to spread to other “important sectors of society: the peasants and the workers” and that, “for easily understandable reasons,” they carry out this work “with the utmost discretion.” For this, he says, “corporate works, spiritual exercise houses, farm-schools, training schools... adequate facilities that represent a strong initial investment” are required. “Sacrifices,” he adds, “of an economic order in the service of God and the Fatherland, so urgent so that the effort that the New State, under the supreme direction of Your Excellency, is making for the complete restoration of a more Christian social order is not ruined by the influence of dark sects and subversive doctrines.

“We must launch ourselves into such a difficult enterprise whatever the cost,” warns Del Portillo, who still takes a couple of paragraphs more to say how much that cost will be. “We do not ask for any special help from the State [...] Our work, although it cooperates effectively with the official work, is private and we plan to do it with our own means. But we need to be initially provided with economic resources in the normal way for any institution: long-term bank credit.” For this reason, he concludes, “we intend to request a corporate loan of 55 million pesetas [around $25 million today] from the Bank of Spain, and we earnestly request Your Excellency to support our request before the Governor of the Bank so that, given the lofty goal being pursued and the solvency offered by the Institute — Spain would have to be in very bad shape for us not to be able to pay — our request will be carefully studied and resolved favorably.”

Franco did not heed the request, because it was not the first. On July 5, 1949, Del Portillo had already written to the Francoist authorities to ask for eight million pesetas of public funds — the equivalent of almost $4.4 million today — for the Roman College of the Holy Cross, “a center of updating for numerary men,” as described by Gore, “to which the most prominent members of Opus Dei would be sent to receive periodic training and to ensure that they followed the message,” although Del Portillo, in his letter, described it as “a great center of international research and culture” to fight against “the heterodox tendencies of thought that so seriously threaten the Church and the values of Western civilization.” The Franco regime, as the British researcher records in his book, ended up donating 1.5 million pesetas.

The Falangist who committed suicide after condemning Opus Dei

This rapprochement and the growing influence of Opus Dei over Franco raised alarm bells — and probably jealousy — in the Spanish Falange. In a report, the fascist political organization warned that Opus Dei wanted to “seize power through cultural institutions” and claimed that “newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, bookstores and even film distributors are linked to Opus and the [national banking institute] Banco Popular.” For the Falange, it soon became obvious that the Opus Dei ministers in the Francoist government (Alberto Ullastres, Mariano Navarro Rubio, and Laureano López Rodó) “did not answer to the Caudillo [Franco], but to a totally different authority.”

In his book, Gore relates that Escrivá Balaguer ordered those members of the regime belonging to Opus Dei to personally meet him whenever he returned to Spain. “This requirement was already quite inconvenient when the founder arrived at Barajas airport, but from time to time he traveled to Spain by car through France, which forced three of the busiest and most powerful men in the country to drop everything and drive five hours to the border with Irún.” The Opus Dei website today carries an article that attempts to refute the “Falangist slogan” about this desire for political influence: “The ministers acted in their own name [...] Opus Dei has no political program and its actions are limited exclusively to the spiritual realm.”

In 1969, one of the founders of the Falange, Francisco Herranz, entered a church in Madrid, confessed, went out into the street and shot himself in the head. A note condemning Opus Dei was found on his body.

One of the institutions that the religious organization infiltrated was the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Created by Franco at the end of 1939, it had a peculiar mission: “To impose the essential ideas that have inspired our Glorious Movement.” José María Albareda, a member of Opus Dei, was appointed to head the institution. “Almost immediately,” Gore recounts in his book, “he began to abuse his position by diverting state funds to his friends in Opus Dei. In its early years, one in every 16 of the lucrative research grants awarded by the CSIC went to members of Opus Dei.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition