Building God's Global Castle

By Richard N. Ostling

Opus Dei is a highly controversial movement in Catholicism

Clad in simple white albs, 77 candidates for the priesthood prostrated themselves before the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica last week as the Supreme Pontiff invoked the blessings of the saints in heaven. Then, while the group knelt in four neat rows, Pope John Paul, followed by Monsignor Alvaro del Portillo, laid hands on the candidates' heads to convey to them the powers of priesthood.

Though the Pope ordains hundreds of priests each year, last week's ceremony was a rite of special significance: 30 of the new priests will serve exclusively within the movement called Opus Dei. This is the third spring in a row that Pope John Paul has so honored the organization, a zealously orthodox network of 74,000 lay Catholics and 1,200 priests spread across 40 nations. Since its founding in 1928, Opus Dei (Latin for Work of God) has become one of the most influential, controversial and mysterious movements in Roman Catholicism.

John Paul's presence at Opus ordinations is only one of many signs of his approval. The Pope's first formal audience in 1984 was with Del Portillo, 70, the prelate of Opus. John Paul's first pastoral visit this year was to an Opus center in Rome. Each Easter evening since his election, the Pope has relaxed by having Opus students drop by to sing songs and read their poems. He has encouraged Opus members to such special tasks as maintaining discreet contact with Catholics in Communist lands and opening a new evangelistic center in Protestant Sweden.

Opus, in turn, offers the church a corps of well-educated, disciplined, profoundly committed Catholics who, as laity in ordinary jobs, can penetrate society in ways that priests cannot. In the Opus concept, each lay Catholic is to sanctify the secular world and his own career and, as

Prelate Del Portillo states it, "seek and find God in the occurrences of daily life." This, he says, turns work from a money-making process into "a task which satisfies the legitimate aspirations of the human heart." A 1979 Opus memo reported that members around the world work, among other things, at 487 universities and schools, 694 newspapers or periodicals, 52 TV or radio stations, 38 publicity agencies and twelve film companies.

The visible works are impressive.

There is a five-story brick-and-stone headquarters building in Rome, which also houses members studying theology. In addition, there is a global network of administrative centers. Members operate the University of Navarre, one of Spain's finest schools, where Opus disciples from many nations study business, engineering and communications. There are also universities in Peru and Colombia and high schools around the world. Houses near 300 university campuses are prime locations for recruiting and preparing new members. Opus also sponsors 200 social-services agencies. The movement has grown slowly in the U.S., where there are only 3,000 adherents, but in nations such as Chile, Kenya and the Philippines it is expanding vigorously.

Although the stress it places upon full lay vocations within the church anticipated progressive thinking at the Second Vatican Council, Opus Dei nevertheless seems distressingly retrograde to its critics.

Among these are Catholic liberals and an outspoken band of disillusioned Opus dropouts. Some detractors refer to the secretive organization as "the Holy Mafia," or "Octopus Dei." One prominent seceder, Oxford Researcher John Roche, has collected 1,500 case histories of disenchanted Opus members that he hopes to present to John Paul this year. Says Roche: "He may see Opus Dei as a counterpoise to the left in the church, but I don't think he has any idea of what is going on."

Perhaps because Opus members are typically reticent about their affiliation and many internal matters of the organization, the movement is constantly knocking down wild, unsubstantiated ru mors about its supposed immense wealth and power. Even within the Vatican, there is disagreement about Opus Dei, al though three top-ranking Cardinals are counted among its strong supporters. One veteran official in Rome says there is "a sharp division" at his congregation (a Vatican Cabinet ministry) between defenders of Opus Dei and doubters. He guesses the doubters are a slight majority.

Interviews with important bishops in several nations bespeak a wary hesitation to criticize Opus openly.

Two events of the past three years have enhanced Opus' stature. In 1981, the Vatican took the first steps toward the canonization of Opus' founder, Spanish Monsignor Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, who died in 1975. Sainthood would vindicate the movement's creation under "divine inspiration," as the Pope has described it, since Escriva's personality, words and works are the essence of Opus.

Under Del Portillo, Escriva's closest collaborator, every Opus action still conforms to "the founder's" intentions.

The other momentous mark of papal favor occurred in 1982, when John Paul granted Opus a new status known as personal prelature. The prelature, a position achieved by no other church group, gives Opus autonomy as a worldwide, nonterritorial jurisdiction with its priests and laity subject to Opus' prelate.

Such unique status is appropriate, for there is nothing in Catholicism quite like Opus Dei. Its membership includes both men and women, though in separated branches. It includes priests, but more significant, it makes demands of its laity more often associated with priests and nuns. Yet it is not a religious order, since its lay members hold secular jobs. It is both highly centralized and decentralized: men's and women's General Councils in Rome, appointed by Del Portillo, set policy and assign national directors, but chapters in each nation plan and finance their own operations.

There are three categories within Opus Dei. The leaders are the university-educated "numeraries," about 30% of the total membership, who make commitments to lifelong celibacy and obedience, turn over their secular incomes, live in communities and take all the course work needed to be priests, although few are ordained. "Associates" (20%) are celibate but do not live in communities or do advanced theological study. "Supernumeraries" (50%) are not celibate and follow modified commitments. Each category contains roughly equal numbers of men and women. There are also 700,000 "cooperators," like 1972 Vice-Presidential Nominee Sargent Shriver, who are not members but sympathizers. Cooperators need not be Catholics or even Christians, a radical concept when Escriva instituted it in 1950.

The Opus vision is immensely attractive to traditionalist Catholics with a strong sense of the church's mission. One well-known supernumerary is Russell Shaw, 49, public-affairs secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference. After his son went to an Opus camp, Shaw decided to attend retreats with a friend. "What I like about the organization is its seriousness," says Shaw. "If you're not committed 100%, you're in the wrong outfit." Numerary Joseph Billmeier, who directs the Opus center in Milwaukee, says that Opus kept him on "an even keel" during his New York stockbroker days, and "sanctified" a hectic career.

Such members follow a devotional life of daily Communion, weekly confession, daily prayers and readings, and regular extended talks with an assigned spiritual director. Numeraries also practice bodily mortification such as fasting or early rising. Periodically, there are also brief sessions of self-flagellation with long braided strings and periods of wearing a type of cilice, a barbed metal band, on the upper thigh. These, explains Father William Stetson, Opus director for four Midwestern states, "are small reminders of what our Lord endured."

Mortification, an ancient Catholic tradition, was well known in Spam when Opus Dei was born. It was in Madrid, on Oct. 2, 1928, that Hospital Chaplain Escriva received an instantaneous vision of the Opus Dei concept as church bells began to ring. Escriva's idea, a reaction to the priest-dominated Spanish church, was to encourage the laity to play an important role in the church. "God led me by the hand," he said later. "Quietly, little by little, until his castle was built." Escriva moved his headquarters to Rome in 1946 to make the movement seem less Spanish and eventually shaped a church subculture through his teachings, including The Way, a collection of 999 maxims ("To be idle is something inconceivable in a man who has apostolic spirit"). Escriva's personal instructions to followers have remained secret, as has the group's constitution.

Spam also imparted a right-wing political image to the movement. From the mid-1950s until Dictator Francisco Franco's death in 1975, Opus members surfaced noticeably in Spanish government and business. Many young Opus technocrats were credited with counteracting the corruption and economic inefficiency of their opponents in the Falangist old guard. Nowadays, Opus disciples, though less visible, continue to hold important public and industrial posts in Spain.

Opus Dei members also have become visibly involved in politics in Latin America. In Chile, under General Augusto Pinochet, Opus members have been assigned top government jobs, especially in education, and control major newspapers and magazines. In Mexico, the Pan American Enterprise Institute, a management training school, and other Opus-linked agencies have taught key government and business leaders.

Though Opus attracts the prominent and wealthy and is harshly attacked by priests who are partisans of the poor, the group does perform social-service work.

In Peru, it sponsors the Institute Rural Valle Grande, where a staff of 30 provides invaluable and highly regarded training for 430 small farmers. Another showcase is Chicago's Midtown Center, a school and youth agency that has prepared nu merous blacks and Hispanics for college.

A senior Vatican official says that the Pope has asked for private commitments from Opus that it will seek out all levels of society and will cooperate with local bishops and other lay movements.

Opus Dei appears to have accepted another reform: limiting its full membership to those over 18, as is now required of religious orders under canon law. Accusations of enlisting teen-agers to the numeraries' life of celibacy, often without notifying their parents, resulted in furious opposition, especially in Western Europe. Theology Stu dent Klaus Steigleder, 25, deals with recruiting practices in a heavily researched book (Opus Dei: An Inside View) published in German last September. At age 14, Steigleder was coaxed into a theater group at a Cologne youth club without knowing it was Opus-related and was gradually drawn into full commitment to the movement. Leaving becomes difficult for members, he says, because "their spirits are broken, and they have lost all touch with everyday life."

Despite the controversy that surrounds Opus Dei, there is agreement, inside the group and out, that an air of unremitting doctrinal conservatism pervades the organization. Says Father Rolf Thomas, a member of the men's General Council: "We are among the most committed defenders of the notion that undebatable truth exists. Doctrine is not debatable, and when doubts arise over what is binding truth, the final word is the Pope's and not some theologian's."

However unnerving they may be to liberal Catholics, the members of Opus Dei now seem to represent, for John Paul, an ideal for today's lay church member.

There is speculation that the organization will gradually fill the traditional role of the Jesuits as an elite vanguard ready to do the bidding of Pope and church, and that John Paul has important evangelizing duties in mind for the organization.

Given Opus Dei's ideology and its rich supply of disciplined members, such papal commissions would not be at all surprising.

--By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Roberto Suro/Rome, with other bureaus

With reporting by Roberto Suro