4 – Opus Dei
While we’re scraping around the darker corners of the Catholic Church and its many differing orders, it would seem amiss not to cover the weird world of Opus Dei. Whether Opus Dei might legitimately be called a secret society or not is moot: while it might not consider itself a secret society, it is certainly a society and certainly incredibly secretive, which more than qualifies it for this article.
Unlike the previous secret organizations, however, it is not millennia or centuries-old, despite the Latin name. Opus Dei was formed in 1928 by Josemaria Escriva, a Spanish Catholic priest and later saint. His goal was to create an institution that proved that all people could be called to holy works and that everyone could ingratiate sanctity into their everyday lives. In essence, everyone should be as saintly as possible, all the time. Noble stuff, for sure.
When Opus Dei was approved as a part of the Catholic Church in 1950, it was already coming in for some severe criticism from other quarters of the church and society at large. A leading Jesuit, Wlodomir Ledochowski, compared it openly to Masonry and protested the secretive nature of Opus Dei’s operations while others pointed out the closeness of Father Escriva to the fascist regime of General Franco in his native Spain.
The global controversy surrounding came from the publication of The Da Vinci Code. While the controversial aspects of Opus Dei depicted in the book and later film had always been there, the subsequent publicity was far from wanted by the organization. The practice of mortification of the flesh, that is, self-harm, is not a new thing to Catholicism or indeed to other religions, but seems at odds with modern methods of worship. Admittedly the way that Paul Bettany’s albino monk in the film is shown to whip himself is far more extreme than that practiced by real Opus Dei members, but the existence of it at all does jar.
Members do not openly declare themselves to be members of Opus Dei and indeed, are not allowed to reveal membership unless allowed to do so by a superior. The conditions in which many members live have come under scrutiny too: some 20% live in closed residential centers that are heavily regimented in lifestyle and contact with the outside world is censored. Critics claim that those who enter the residential centers may well do so of their own free will, but once inside, they are discouraged from contacting family members and friends in the outside world and thus may not be able to leave as and when they want to.
Of course, traditionalist Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei are big believers in the so-called “sign of contradiction”, by which the place where God truly dwells will be the most criticized. The way in which Opus Dei stands askance from the modern world and, indeed, the majority of the modern church, will not bother them one jot.