#opus dei

Well shit........

Saint Josemaría Escrivá

1902-1975

Feast day: June 26

José María Mariano Escriva Albás was a Roman Catholic priest from Spain who founded Opus Dei, an organization of laypeople and priests dedicated to the teaching that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity. He was canonized in 2002 by Pope John Paul II, who declared Saint Josemaría should be "counted among the great witnesses of Christianity."

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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Sun Chariots were used by the bronze eyed children of raptor god in their conquest of the continent. Unlike a four wheeled, heavily armoured war-wagons of Unu’ki those two wheeled chariots were a great example of manoeuvrability on the battlefield.

Pulled by a pair of stocky steppe horses, decorated with animal skins, bells and hunting trophies, they usually carried an equipage of two - a driver and a bowman. The latter usually being a nobleman carrying in himself a descent ammount of the raptor god’s seed, which was believed to give them inhuman eyesight, and above average strength to pull the bowstring.

Just a dozen of such chariots, could send a deadly rain of arrows on the ranks of those standing in their way, swiftly retreating out of the close combat range where they could be interferred by pikemem, right after, and than returning to continue harrasing the enemy, untill few survivors retreat.

By Harriet Barber in Buenos Aires Mon 15 Dec 2025

Buenos Aires will on Tuesday host the first-ever international gathering of former Opus Dei members who say they were tricked and trafficked into domestic servitude as minors – allegations that have drawn scrutiny of the powerful, secretive Catholic group. Pope Leo XIV privately urged organisers to convene the conference, the Guardian has learned.

Forty-three women in Argentina say they were lured to Opus Dei schools as children and teenagers under promises of receiving an education. Instead, they say they were forced into working up to 12-hour days, cooking and cleaning for the elite male members, without pay.

They say they faced extreme levels of control, with their letters censored, family visits discouraged, and the reading of anything other than children’s books or religious texts banned. When the women eventually escaped, they say they were left without money, clothes or qualifications.

After hearing the women’s testimonies, federal prosecutors in Argentina launched an investigation, accusing senior leaders of Opus Dei in South America of overseeing the exploitation and trafficking of girls, adolescents and women between 1972 and 2015.

Sebastián Sal, the lawyer representing the 43 women in the trafficking case, said the case had been held up in recent months because two witnesses, who are part of Opus Dei, have delayed their testimonies.

Although the Holy See has not formally responded to the complaint, it is believed to have contributed to Pope Francis’s decision in 2022 to revise Opus Dei’s standing and curtail some of its long-held privileges. The Vatican, under Pope Leo, is reviewing revised statutes for Opus Dei.

A source with knowledge of the case, who asked not to be named to speak freely about the conference, said Leo had encouraged the organisers to hold the event. They believe the pontiff could make a formal statement after the conference, which is being hosted by Ending Clergy Abuse, a global network of human rights defenders and survivors. A spokesperson for the Vatican said he could neither confirm nor deny the reporting.

Paula Bistagnino, an Argentine investigative journalist whose reporting and book Te Serviré helped bring widespread attention to the allegations of trafficking and servitude involving Opus Dei, said that with the Vatican preparing to decide on Opus Dei’s new statutes, it was essential that the pope and church authorities “listen to the victims of Opus Dei”.

“It is time for the world to listen to them and for justice to be done,” Bistagnino added.

Opus Dei, which has a presence in more than 70 countries, said it categorically denied the accusations in Argentina. A spokesperson added that it strongly shared the aim of “eradicating abuses within the Catholic church and throughout society, now following the guidance of Pope Leo”.

Claudia Carrero during her time with Opus Dei.

Sal claimed Opus Dei’s exploitation of “young teenagers and women from very poor, rural families” was still happening. He said any announcement from the Vatican could send a clear sign to the Argentine courts to move forward with their investigation.

Claudia Carrero, one of the 43 claimants, will attend the conference on Tuesday. She said she was taken to an Opus Dei school at age 13 in 1979 after being promised training in hotel management. “They did not take me there to study, but to work,” she said. “I had no control over anything in my life. I had to ask for permission to call my parents, all our mail was read, we were not allowed to go out alone.”

Carrero said she hoped the conference “prompts concrete institutional changes within the church”, adding she had heard similar accounts from women in Mexico, Italy, Poland, Spain, Ireland, Peru and Chile: “All of us lived the same experiences, identical ones. That is no coincidence.”

Sal said many of the women were anxious about sharing their testimony. “They’re afraid, but they want people to know what happened to them,” he said.

Opus Dei is a Catholic organization founded in Spain in the 1920s. It purchased Mercer House in Princeton in 1989. The activities of its priest, C. John McCloskey, sparked immediate controversy on the Princeton University campus--as did the response of McCloskey's critics.

For "cultural nonfiction" I read Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church by Gareth Gore and uh. geez. that was. a lot. and terrifying. and depressing.