I DON'T KNOW IF THE OPUS DEI CULT coopted John Paul II or if, as I long ago suspected, he was all in on it. Early in his papacy I suspect he was an actual CIA asset before and during at least the early years of his papacy, but he was certainly part of what is being revealed about how evil and dangerously powerful that fascist cult has been.
The warnings were given eary and contiuously from the 1940s, when those who were alarmed by the authoritarian secret society started telling the Vatican that it was dangerous. I'm not that familiar with those warnings until the reactionary and, in so many ways, disasterous papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI, so I don't know how the other popes and figures in the Vatican took those warnings, though clearly they either weren't taken as seriously as they should have been or the warnings were things that didn't bother them very much. Benedict, whatever else you can say about him, at least took some of those warnings serously, though he was a weak man when it came to opposing the powerful and wealthy, and too beholden to the seriously flawed legacy of his patron and predecessor, JPII. John Paul II, on th other hand, was a total sucker for the fascist, neo-medieval, hyper-clerical-financially-tied-in cult. He rushed through the canonization of its truly evil founder, Josemaria Escriva whose sainthood is as dubious a one as has been given official status in the modern period. He also made the cult a power in itself, a "personal prelature" which was not answerable to local bishops.
It is encouraging that Pope Leo has had a private meeting with the author of what appears to be an extremely important expose of Opus Dei, Gareth Gore, and that Leo seems to take the revelations of corruption, moral, financial, personal, human trafficking and enslavement, secretive political influence and everything else that Gore has documented in his book, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church. You can hear him talking about his meeing, here.
It's not only liberals and liberal Catholics who think Opus Dei is dangerous, here's a conservative Catholic, (John Farrell identifies himself as such at the beginning of his review) who goes into considerable detail. I will post just some of what he says that directly corrupts U.S. politics.*
The most notorious figure in the American Opus network was the late Father C. John McCloskey, a former Wall Street broker turned priest of the prelature. In 1998, he was appointed the head of the Catholic Information Center (CIC) in Washington, D.C. Initially a modest chapel and bookstore entrusted to Opus Dei, the CIC, under McCloskey, became a central meeting place for high profile conservative Catholics working in the nation’s capital. He became famous for the conversions of right-wing politicians and scholars: the likes of Newt Gingrich, Senator Sam Brownback, and the late Judge Robert Bork. McCloskey also became a regular commentator on shows like CNN’s Crossfire, NBC’s Nightly News, Dateline, and Meet the Press, where he inveighed against “the culture of death,” contraception, IVF, and abortion, famously insisting that no Catholic could vote for Democrats with a clear conscience.
Around 2002, as the clergy abuse scandal was turning the American Catholic church inside out, McCloskey suddenly disappeared from public view. It would only come out in 2019 that he had been removed from his post at the CIC after a married woman member of Opus Dei sought legal action over his aggressive sexual overtures to her in private counseling sessions. Members of Opus Dei at first assured the woman that McCloskey would no longer serve in active ministry and settled the case for just under a million dollars. When she discovered that McCloskey was not only in active ministry but hearing confessions, she went public with her story. McCloskey, a heavy drinker, died of early Alzheimer’s at a home for priests in early 2023.
Even without McCloskey, the CIC has continued to be a magnet for conservative U.S. Catholics, including Leonard Leo, a leading member of the Federalist Society, which is dedicated to installing ultra-conservative judges in the federal courts and ultimately on the supreme court. According to Gore, in his chapter on Opus Dei’s connections in American politics, the overturning of Roe v. Wade would not have been possible without the direct involvement of Opus Dei insiders working for Trump and longtime Catholic influencers like Leo. With Trump’s re-election, their involvement will only deepen through their connections with the authors of Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Its President Kevin Roberts is a patron of Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center where he receives regular spiritual guidance.
One of the foremost tools of corruption by Opus Dei is its secretiveness which was baked into it from the start, like an organized crime network. Members are required or encouraged to keep their membership in it a secret so there is no reliable way of knowing if someone who is suspected of Opus Dei membership is, actually, a member. I certainly wouldn't put lying about that past any of that list of Republican-fascists given in that passage or, really, anyone who gives any reason to make someone suspicious. I would like it if Leo ordered an end to such secrecy if for no other reason than that it might lessen the suspicion of that for those who are innocent of cult membership. I strongly suspect at least a three of the right-wing Catholics on the Supreme Court of membership, though two of those would seem to have defected to the Episcopal church, at least that's what I recall them claiming. Episcopalians, beware.
I would like there to be a full investigation into whether Opus Dei has trafficked people to or from or inside of the United States, especially those Women who are suckered into it young and then spend their lives slaving away for men who they are never even supposed to see. I would like any crime they are involved in any corruption they are involved in exposed and those involved prosecuted. As a Catholic, I would like to see the thing entirely exposed, its secret documents made public, testimony of its victims taken in public and the thing dissolved.
Unfortunatly, I don't think there is any liklihood that the disgusting canonization of Escriva to be disavowed by the Catholic church, I'm unaware of any proceedure for doing so and to do so would bring that other dubious saint, JPII into disrepute. Personally, I don't find anything about either of their alleged saintliness to be at all convincing. I would welcome a very severe slowing down of the saint-making process that JPII sped up so he could indulge his theatrical tendencies, I don't think anyone should be canonized for more than a century after their deaths when all of those with personal interests in that are, also, long gone and the cover ups of any potential scandals ended. I especially think there should be a moratorium in not ban on canonizing popes.
But, then, I'm old enough to remember when a long list of early and medieval saints were taken off the calendar back in the 1960s, including such popular ones as St. Valentine and St. Christopher. You never know what they might do sometime in the future though I'm not going to live to see it.
* In looking around online you will find a lot of lies that are clearly posted by either those in Opus Dei or those who like he corrupt fascist cult. One of the things I read said that Pope Paul IV was an admirer of the cult. Farrell says this in his review:
In private, Gore writes, Escriva was given to fits of rage, and open contempt for popes John XXIII and Paul VI. As Gore shows in a depiction of one revealing meeting between the two, it seems Pope Paul saw through Escriva from the beginning.
I can't say that Paul VI is among my favorite popes but I've had reason to come to respect him a lot more than I used to. I think a lot of the things I didn't like about him were a result of his trying to cope with the extremely powerful reactionaries and arch conservatives in the hierarchy and in Catholic circles. I hope Leo has the courage to effectively suppress such as that.
