#excatholic

For sure!

Disclaimer: I’m not a cult expert, I’m not a religious scholar, and I’m not a lawyer or reporter. I’m just someone who was involved with Opus Dei for eight years and has family still involved, and who was harmed spiritually, mentally, and emotionally by my limited experience in it as not a full member.

Second disclaimer: Opus Dei is a cult in the style of high control groups and their criteria, not in the style of whatever the heck Dan Brown was dreaming up for The Da Vinci code, lol

The tldr is that Opus Dei is an insular, very private, very exclusive, elite-focused group that is not transparent and has hurt a lot of people, regardless of intent. There are certainly good people within it, and not all their work is bad, but there are HUGE institutional issues and abuses of power, plus it was founded as a cult of personality around a man they’ve really glazed hard over the years (and who got VERY fast tracked to being canonized a saint just years after his death, which has gotten suspiciously common in the Catholic Church in recent decades 🤨, despite the process being meant to be long and deliberate for good reason, and most Saints waiting decades to centuries to move from Blessed to Saint. I did NOT spend all of high school taking courses about detailed Church History and Canon Law and Curia structure and sainthood processes and all that to NOT speak up about the weird changes I’ve seen from what I was taught is the way the Church rules and processes are set up!!!).

The group also doesn’t follow the structural oversight requirement of every other religious order in the entire Catholic Church, because JP2 gave it special treatment back in the day. It proceeded to operate in all the decades following that with pretty much total impunity and essentially zero external oversight. Its members report to each other and their in-group priests, and they’re encouraged to stay in-house, not be part of the dioceses they live in, and not be overseen by the Curia or any local bishops or whatever. (In fact, Pope Francis recently issued a motu proprio and another motu proprio the year after it to change that a bit and start closing the loopholes.)

They also aren’t transparent with people about exactly what membership entails until after they’ve already whistled.

They exert an extreme amount of financial, time, spiritual, social, emotional, physical, and mental control over their members. They’ve also gotten very entwined in finance, business, education, and politics, and they’re also being accused of decades of labor trafficking. The main case against them for that so far is in Argentina.

(I should also note a personal pet peeve of mine about the whole thing, which is that while they treat Josemaria as their inspired deity second to God, and his teachings and ideas as God’s great gift to mankind, he wasn’t even original. He wasn’t remotely the first saint—or Christian—to come up with the ideas of trying to sanctify your daily life and turn everything you do into a prayer and embrace sacrifice and virtue. Like, at bare minimum, St. Therese’s Little Way exists, Thomas Merton’s writing exists, etc. etc. Come on, guys.)

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Not a comprehensive list, but some good places to start looking for info

Recent reporting on it from non-Catholic reporters (you can also find many more secular and Catholic articles, these are just the two reporters who I know have been dedicating significant time to it):

Antonia Cundy, Financial Times investigative journalist

The Opus Dei diaries: How girls around the world were coerced into decades of gruelling service to the secretive Catholic group

Catholic group Opus Dei accused of recruiting children

Opus Dei leaders accused of ‘extreme exploitation’ of women in Argentina

Gareth Gore, a financial reporter (he also has a Substack dedicated to his work looking into financial crimes in the history of Opus Dei that turned into a book called Opus)

OPUS Substack

OPUS book

A couple YouTube channels that discuss it (so do many others, but I’m not on my laptop where I bookmarked any others rn)

Steven Hassan’s channel (he’s a leading cult expert)

The Deep Dive Project (not a professional, but definitely deep dived in recent years lol)

Sources and websites where ex-members share their experiences and any information or documents they have:

(Remember to question all of it, because while people are usually genuine, they can definitely be more emotional or mistaken about things than measured reporting or legal investigations usually are, so don’t dismiss them but take some things or some posts with a grain of salt, as you should any time emotional human beings are sharing upsetting things)

Opus Libros

Opus Dei Awareness Network (ODAN)

A Wikipedia page about Opus Dei controversy

Opus Info

r/opusdeiexposed

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