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Opus Dei: Secrets and Power Inside the Catholic Church

by John L. Allen

Allen Lane, $290

Opus Dei, which means the 'Work of God', is a group of some 85,500   strictly conservative Catholics who believe in  the teachings of the  Catholic Church and the infallibility of the Pope. As a 'personal prelature', its members answer only to the Vatican. They can be found all over the world, including Hong Kong.

They are largely professionals - doctors, lawyers, accountants, journalists and politicians - dedicated to fostering Catholic principles at  all levels of society.

What Opus Dei is not, says John Allen, the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, is a secret society wielding such power as to have been dubbed 'papal shock troops', nor is it engaged in assassination or money laundering. And anyone who thinks it's some special strike force in the battle between conservatives and moderates to reverse the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the mid-1960s has simply got it wrong, Allen says.

If that was what this book was about, it would be an interesting read. Instead, Allen, for all his supposedly unprecedented access to the powers that be, has done a 350-page hagiology.

There are tantalising titbits.

'As lay people and ordinary citizens, Opus Dei members can set up shop in places such  as China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, where Christian proselytism is either forbidden or heavily discouraged,' he writes. 'They have the capacity to 'penetrate tough markets' for the Catholic Church.'

Alas, there's no follow-through.

Opus Dei: Secrets and Power Inside the Catholic Church can, on the surface, be seen as aimed at calming the flock  after Dan Brown's blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, in which fictional members of this ultra-conservative    sect go to murderous lengths to keep hidden the secret of the Holy Grail.

It may also be spin for the Vatican: Opus Dei members are close advisers to Pope Benedict XVI,  formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,  who held the office of what used to be known as Holy Inquisitor. Ratzinger blames the decline of the Catholic Church after Vatican II in part on 'the success of the upper middle class, the new 'tertiary bourgeoisie', with its liberal-radical ideology of individualistic, rationalistic and hedonistic stamp'.

Allen, 40, wrote a rather scathing book about Ratzinger, but was quick to revise his views   about Pope Benedict XVI, much to the chagrin  of moderates in the Vatican.

Opus Dei, founded in 1928 by Josemaria Escriva,  a wealthy Spanish lawyer turned priest who received his instructions in a vision and was made a saint for his 'simplicity and humility'  by Pope John Paul II in 2002, has until recently declined to comment on anything about itself  or its members.

Allen says Escriva preferred to turn the  other cheek than answer allegations about his ties to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco,  his acquiescence to Nazism, and his avowedly anti-communist stance - one shared with the Polish Pope John Paul II.

Opus Dei, as an organisation, is now more open - a so-called unprecedented documentary will be broadcast later this year - but Brown's fiction has considerable currency and Ron Howard's movie of The Da Vinci Code, which is due out next May starring Tom Hanks, won't  be hurt by the publicity. Nor will the Discalced Carmelite Convent of Saint Theresa in Livorno, Italy, which makes a line of pain-inflicting gadgetry for mortification, including a  haircloth and a spiked cross for the chest.

Allen could have said more about the often lethal consequences of active opposition of Opus Dei members to 'liberation theology' in South America than insisting Opus Dei doesn't tell its members what to do.

The main concern about this book, however, is the absence of critical discussion about  how   Opus Dei influences decisions and the  point at which blind faith in a doctrine comes before individual ethical responsibility in a wider society.



Opus Dei: Secrets and Power Inside the Catholic Church