Opus Dei of Judgment

A discussion with the journalist Gareth Gore, author of the new book "OPUS: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church"

Gareth Gore, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, is a financial journalist who has reported from over 25 countries and covered some of the biggest financial stories in his two decades in the business. His writing has been published by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and International Financing Review. He is the host of The Syndicate, which tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the biggest financial deals in history.

His new book, five years in the making, is OPUS: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church. This is not The DaVinci Code, which was a wretched work of fiction. This is actual journalism. This is the Opus Dei expose we’ve been waiting for.

Gareth Gore has boldly gone where no journalist has gone before. He shines a light on the secretive prelature with ties to Trump’s SCOTUS whisperer—my bugbear, the radical Catholic weirdo Leonard Leo—and more political heavyweights than you can shake a stick at. OPUS delves into the origins of Opus Dei, its ties to Franco’s fascist Spain, its recruiting techniques, its sexually- and socioeconomically-segregated structure, its control of a Spanish bank that collapsed, and, most critically as the 2024 election approaches, its influence in the corridors of power in Washington.

Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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1. Gareth Gore is not a threat to the Catholic Church. But Opus Dei is.

Contrary to the assertion made by the prelature in its press release responding to the book’s publication, OPUS is not “an attack on Opus Dei.” Nor is Gore an anti-Catholic bigot, as some on social media have alleged.

“This is not an anti-Catholic book,” Gore tells me. “I’m not anti-Catholic in any way. All I’ve done is follow the money initially and then found out a series of horrific facts: children and young girls being kind of coerced and manipulated and drawn into this cult—all in the name of Christianity. This is the most un-Christian organization there is. I mean, the Church really needs to rein in this organization and really needs to tackle the abuses that are being carried out in its name.”

What Gore found, while looking into the sudden collapse of a Spanish bank, is an organization operating in darkness. Girls recruited—groomed, we might say—in poorer countries like Argentina, the Philippines, and Nigeria, coerced into joining the organization, and then whisked away to richer countries like the United States, where, strangers in a strange land, they served Opus Dei by living in sexually segregated Opus Dei housing, cooking and cleaning for the Opus Dei men, and not being compensated for their labor. This is the story Gore tells, and that the prelature “categorically” denies: “This allegation is deeply offensive not only to Opus Dei but also to real victims of human trafficking. Opus Dei categorically denies that it has ever been involved in human trafficking of any kind.”

Prosecutors in Argentina hold with Gore. Just this week, AP filed a story from Buenos Aires reporting that “Argentine prosecutors have concluded that there are grounds for launching a criminal investigation into the highest authorities of Opus Dei in South America between 1983 and 2015 for the crimes of human trafficking and labor exploitation against at least 44 women recruited by the religious order to perform domestic tasks in their homes.”

I am a confirmed Catholic, but a lapsed one; I haven’t attended Mass since 1991 unless it’s a funeral. So while I cannot speak for mainstream Catholics everywhere, I’m fairly certain most of them would not be cool with the RCC being used as a shield so that members of a reactionary fringe group can engage in human trafficking and forced labor because they are too busy whipping themselves and recruiting new followers to scramble their own eggs and clean their own bathrooms. My Aramaic is rusty, but I’m pretty sure Matthew 25:35 does not translate to, “For I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me drink, I was a stranger and you kept me as a slave in your house to cook and clean for you.”

So: no, Gore is not a religious bigot. He’s a business journalist who was shocked at what he unearthed.

“I believe that Opus Dei is a threat to the wider Church,” he says. “I think the actions of Opus Dei are extremely corrosive for Catholicism. So if you as a serious Catholic, if you want to defend the church and your faith, then what you need to do is, you need to engage with the facts that I present in the book, and you need to address this huge problem at the center of the church, which is Opus Dei.”

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2. Opus Dei actively recruits the next generation of movers and shakers.

One of the main reasons that Christianity grew so quickly in the first few centuries Anno Domini is that the Church took care of the dead. The poor joined for spiritual reasons, yes, but also because the costs of burial would be absorbed by the Church. While it was undoubtedly good for business when Constantine the Great converted to Christianity, making it the official religion of the Roman Empire, the membership during the early days was generally bottom-up, not top-down.

Opus Dei has the opposite approach, actively recruiting bright, privileged, well-off, and influential members. “Opus Dei goes after the elites, right?” Gore tells me. “So generally it’s going to be targeting people who are at least educated to university level, ideally higher. It wants people who are going to be tomorrow’s politicians and lawyers and bankers and whatever. So it goes after—very specifically goes after that kind of person.”

In reading OPUS and talking to Gore, I was struck by how “culty” this all is. L. Ron Hubbard hit up important people for Scientology, managing to attract a lot of converts in Hollywood. Ditto the Christian nationalists and the “seven mountains” they seek to conquer: family, religion, education, business, government, entertainment, and media. Keith Raniere, the founder of NVIXM, managed to woo a number of prominent, rich, and powerful people in Mexico, as well as a co-star of Smallville.

The Keith Raniere of Opus Dei was a stockbroker-turned-priest named C. John McCloskey III. This was back in the 90s. He closed on conversions like a holy Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. And his base of operations was the nation’s capital.

“Opus Dei had been trying for decades to break into Washington,” Gore says. “He really transformed the fortunes in Washington…McCloskey started out as a stockbroker, and I think a lot of the techniques of cold calling clients and basically kind of pushing them into buying stocks or bonds that the bank was trying to offload. I think that was amazing training material for him, for what he was later going to do, which was to basically use very similar kind of hot-house recruitment techniques to target the Washington political elite.”

Among those Beltway power brokers in McCloskey’s sphere of influence: Clarence Thomas, Louis Freeh, Newt Gingrich, Sam Brownback, and Bill Barr. And like Keith Raniere, McCloskey fell from grace because of a sex scandal, which wound up costing Opus Dei almost a million bucks.

And look: Opus Dei can recruit, or try to recruit, whoever it wants. That’s their Constitutional right in this country. But if you’re going to actively target Washington’s elite, you can’t then claim, as the prelature does, that your members “represent neither the Catholic Church nor Opus Dei” in their “political activities,” or that they are not “driven by a thirst for power and wealth, and the ambition to control people.” If you don’t want to control people, why are you recruiting the very individuals who have the most control over the American legal system—and who are working to make that legal system hew to a medieval worldview?

In a speech at Benedictine College, Leonard Leo, garbed like a medieval friar, aired his grievances about this, in a masterful display of next-level gaslighting: “Current-day bigots, the progressive Ku Klux Klan, spread false and slanderous rhetoric about Catholic apostolates, and institutions like the one represented here tonight. They mock our practices and devotions. They repeat the KKK canard that Catholics want this country dominated and controlled by a theocracy, which no well-informed Catholics should ever support.”

Sure thing, Lenny. But if that’s the case, why have you spent your entire career infiltrating and subverting the judicial branch—occupying six seats on the Supreme Court!—just to make the law of the land conform to your own retrograde religious beliefs about women’s medical care, contraception, and the LGBTQ community? Riddle me that! What is Project 2025 if not a plan to lurch the United States more in line with the Opus Dei way of thinking? After all, the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, is, like Leo, a radical Catholic extremist with ties to the prelature.

“It’s very interesting to kind of compare Project 2025 and Opus Dei,” Gore says. “I mean, just like Project 2025, Opus Dei started out and still remains today as very much a political project. So this priest that started up the movement, [Josemaría] Escrivá, he developed Opus Dei as a reactionary stand against the progressive forces that were transforming the lives of the poor and the downtrodden in Spain in the 1930s. Effectively that’s what people like Roberts and Leo want to do today…they want to push back the progressive forces. They don’t care about the rights of the poor and the downtrodden. They have a very specific vision of how the world should look.”

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3. Members of Opus Dei view this as a holy war.

Read the speeches given by Leonard Leo at Benedictine, or Bill Barr at Notre Dame. Read the quotes from McCloskey, or Kevin Roberts’s forward to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. One of the themes is the idea that this is a holy war—that good and innocent Catholics are under attack from progressives, or secularists, or the woke, or godless heathens, or the neo-KKK, or whatever provocative term they use (boldface mine):

Leo: “This is spiritual warfare. Our opponents are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of. He has hardened their hearts and closed their minds, which means reason alone will not win this struggle.”

McCloskey (to the Boston Globe’s Charles P. Piece): “Do I think it’s possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life, the sanctity of family, over a period of time to choose to survive with people who think it’s OK to kill women and children or for—quote—homosexual couples to exist and be recognized? No, I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t know how it’s going to work itself out, but I know it’s not possible, and my hope and prayer is that it does not end in violence. But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way.”

Barr: “Ground zero for these attacks on religion are the schools…For the government to interfere in that process is a monstrous invasion of religious liberty. Yet here is where the battle is being joined, and I see the secularists are attacking…”

This is consistent with Josemaría Escrivá’s worldview, as Gore explains: “So Escrivá saw his followers as basically kind of soldiers who were—he called them a rising militia, a rising militia of apostles carrying out the orders of Christ. And I think [Kevin] Roberts, certainly from the kind of speeches he’s given and the language he uses, I think he’s very much part of this kind of Opus Dei militia. And he’s been weaned on this kind of philosophy of radical Catholic militancy.”

The truth of the matter is that we “barbarians, secularists, and bigots,” as Leonard Leo calls us, have no interest in attacking Opus Dei, or Catholicism, or Christianity, or religion of any kind. Freedom of religion is a right enshrined in our Constitution, and no one seeks to take that away.

But freedom of religion doesn’t grant any one religious group the right to foist its own belief system onto the rest of us. And that’s what Leo, Barr, and their Opus Dei-adjacent fellow travelers seek to do, whether they are aware of it or not. Leo wants to impose his own anti-scientific, anti-medical, anti-woman, fairy-tale beliefs about abortion and contraception onto all of us, even though most Americans do not want that. And he’s successfully accomplished this in most of the red states, to the detriment of the women there. How is that not theocratic?

“Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” Bill Barr says.

Not true, Billy. What we want, as Tim Walz has adroitly articulated, is for religious zealots like Leo and Barr and Roberts to mind their own business.

That’s not so much to ask for. Or to pray for.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S8 E5: Opus Dei & Opus Knight (with Gareth Gore)

Opus Dei is not your grandfather’s dark money cult…unless your grandfather was a card-carrying fascist in Franco’s Spain.

Gareth Gore is a financial journalist and editor with close to two decades of experience, who has reported from over twenty-five countries and covered some of the biggest financial stories. His writing has been published by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and International Financing Review. He is the host of The Syndicate, which tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the biggest financial deals in history. His new book, five years in the making, is “OPUS: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church.”

In this conversation with Greg Olear, Gore delves into the controversial practices of Opus Dei, its financial manipulations, and the historical context of its formation. Gore highlights the cult-like control mechanisms employed by the organization, the allegations of human trafficking, and the dynamics of gender within Opus Dei. He also examines the appeal of the organization to its members and the significant political influence of key figures like dark money maestro Leonard Leo and the late Rev. C. John McCloskey III. The discussion raises critical questions about the implications of Opus Dei's actions for the Catholic Church, the United States, and society at large. Plus: the MAGA playbook!

Follow Gareth Gore
https://x.com/gareth_gore

Buy his book:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Opus/Gareth-Gore/9781668016145

Subscribe to The Five 8:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0BRnRwe7yDZXIaF-QZfvhA

Check out ROUGH BEAST, Greg’s new book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D47CMX17

ROUGH BEAST is now available as an audiobook:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Rough-Beast-Audiobook/B0D8K41S3T

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Photo credit: Bolando. Statue of the sainted Opus Dei founder at the Vatican.