Many probably remember from books and films how Dan Brown portrayed Opus Dei in The Da Vinci Code as a secret sect hiding important information. You may be aware, but I will remind you that this is a really existing religious organization today.
But who are they really, these monks living in the world: "saboteurs of the Vatican", cold-blooded murderers engaged in ritual self-torture, or respectable Christians who seek their way to God in everyday life?
In early October 1928, Catholic priest Josemaría Exriva de Balaguer experienced a revelation and founded Opus Dei, one of the world's most mysterious organizations.
This is how it was …
Josemaría Exriva de Balaguer was born in the Spanish province of Aragon in 1902. He deliberately combined his two names into one to emphasize the connection between Joseph (Jose) and Mary. As a child, he fell seriously ill with meningitis and recovered only after his mother took him to the skete of the Virgin of Torresiudad. Since then, Escriva grew up very devout and took the first communion as soon as Pope Pius X lowered the age limit for him. In the winter of 1917–1918, between Catholic Christmas and the Baptism of the Lord, Escriva had his first epiphany, and he realized that he wanted to serve God. At 18 he entered the Pontifical University of Zaragoza and was ordained a priest in March 1925, after which he moved to Madrid.
Revelation descended on Escriva on October 2, 1928, on the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels, when he heard bells ringing in a Madrid monastery and saw “Opus Dei, as the Lord wanted to found it”. Two years later, the first layman appeared in the organization - Isidoro Sorsano. In 1933, the first Opus Dei center (Latin for "God's work"), the Derecho y Arquitectura Academy (Spanish for "law and architecture"), was opened in Madrid, where the relevant subjects were taught.
In 1936, a civil war broke out in Spain, and in order to avoid reprisals from the Republicans, Escriva feigned mental illness for almost six months, hiding from anti-clerical forces in a mental hospital. When Francisco Franco was finally victorious, the founder of Opus Dei returned to the Spanish capital and published the book Camino (Spanish for "The Way"), consisting of 999 spiritual aphorisms. For 70 years, more than 4.5 million copies of The Way have been printed. Escriva did not stop at one book, later he published collections of sayings "Furrow" and "Forge", as well as books "Christ passes by", "Friends of God", "Way of the Cross" and others that have not yet been translated into Russian.
Josemaría Exriva de Balaguer. Photo: Opus Dei Rome / Getty Images / Fotobank.ru
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In 1946, Escriva moved to Rome, which helped him not only to expand the area of dissemination of his ideas, but also to get closer to influential structures in the Vatican. In 1948, the Roman College of the Holy Cross was opened, which later became the Pontifical University. Four years later, the University of Navarre was founded in Pamplona, which became the main source of new members for the organization.
Activities
When the need to create Opus Dei was revealed to Escrivu, the Lord, according to the priest, commanded that "Christians gladly sacrifice themselves for the sake of others and consecrate any of their activities, any conscientious work, any occupation on Earth." Thus, the main goal towards which the members of the organization are moving has become the achievement of holiness in the process of performing daily work and work. According to Escriva's conviction, holiness is not the exclusive prerogative of monks and priests, but is available to every layman who observes the gospel commandments. Moreover, holiness is achieved not through spiritual practices, but through earthly everyday affairs. Despite this, Opus Dei members need to spend a significant part of their time in various prayers, thinking "about how to act according to conscience",reading the New Testament and taking communion - all this must be done daily.
Once a week, lay people at Opus Dei come together to discuss the traditions of the organization, as well as issues of conscience and spiritual life. Once a month, a "day of remembrance" is held on which they meditate, converse and pray. Every year, members of the organization must take a special course, which, depending on their category, lasts from several days to a week. Also, several days a year should be spent in "solitude", that is, to be silent and meditate.
Escriva and his successors insist that members of the organization are ordinary people with free will who decide for themselves whom to vote for, where to invest and with whom to communicate. They, like everyone else, go to work, raise children and pay taxes, but their every day-to-day business is aimed at “illuminating the world from the inside,” by their own example, to show others how to take the path of holiness.
To prevent people from considering the members of the organization cultists, the future leader of Opus Dei, Alvarodel Portillo, had to start smoking when Escriva noticed that none of the three priests standing in front of him smoked. In 1944, this circumstance may have seemed suspicious.
Structure
Today, Opus Dei has more than 90 thousand members, about two thousand of them are priests. Moreover, the "divine calling" is the same for all members, regardless of their gender and category, which serve to indicate their "usefulness" for the organization. 70% of Opus Dei are supernumerary, which in fact are ordinary lay people, live in their homes, can get married and even remain members of their parish. Caring for their own families makes the supernumerary quite useless for the organization, but they support it financially through monthly donations.
200,000 pilgrims in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican at the Canonization ceremony of Josemaría Exriva de Balaguer, presided over by Pope John Paul II, October 6, 2002. Photo: Paolo Cocco / Reuters.
About 20% of the organization's members are numberrariums. They are celibate and live in Opus Dei centers, allowing them to concentrate fully on their inner work, although most of them have a worldly profession as well. The numberrarians give the organization all the funds that remain with them after personal expenses. In addition to the numberaries, associate members are celibate, but they do not have to live in Opus Dei centers.
In all centers of the organization, about four thousand women live and work, whose category is called “assistants of the numberrarians”. They do cooking, cleaning and other household chores that take them all day and are considered their professional activities. Since only women are accepted as assistants, Opus Dei is periodically accused of discriminating against them and promoting the traditional image of a submissive woman. Members of the organization object to this that women are more predisposed to housekeeping, and generally it is not worth changing the idea that Escriva once had.
Javier Echevarria Rodriguez, the current prelate of Opus Dei, has over two thousand personal prelature priests. They lead local congregations, teach at universities and seminaries, and in other ways provide patronage to Opus Dei members. Despite the declared equality of men and women before the attainment of holiness, only men can become priests.
The last category that exists in the structure of Opus Dei is the so-called employees who are not members of the organization, but in every possible way help its prosperity. Their number is twice the number of full members due to the fact that if only a Catholic can be a supernumerary, then a person of any confession can become an employee. Currently, Opus Dei employees include Orthodox Christians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and even atheists.
Vatican
At the 1969 convention, Escriva pioneered the idea of turning Opus Dei into a personal prelature. The founder of the organization did not have time to wait for it to enter the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, as he died in June 1975. Seven years later, Pope John Paul II granted this status to Opus Dei, and the organization became the only personal prelature in the Catholic Church. After Escriva's death, letters from 69 cardinals, 241 archbishops, 987 bishops and 41 generals of the Religious Congregations came to the Vatican to support his beatification. In 1992 Josemaria Escriva was proclaimed blessed, and ten years later the Vatican canonized him.
Opus Dei priests before the beatification ceremony for Alvaro del Portillo in Madrid. Photo: Andres Kudacki / AP.
John Paul II was not the first pope to venerate Opus Dei. As early as 1947, Pius XII published a papal constitution allowing the creation of "secular organizations" and then recognized Escriva's brainchild as the first such organization. In addition, Pius XII opposed the desire of the Vatican to split the "Cause of God" into male and female halves and remove its leader. His successor, John XXIII, appreciated the mission of Opus Dei and the opportunities it presented to it. Paul VI used the "Way" in his meditations, and John Paul I acknowledged that Escriva invented worldly spirituality.
The good will of the church has repeatedly given rise to all kinds of speculation about the influence of Opus Dei on the Vatican and the expansion of its control over the Catholic Church as its popularity grew. American journalist John Allen, an American journalist specializing in the Vatican, wrote that in 2004, of the 500 important positions defining the Vatican's policy, only 20 were held by members of Opus Dei, so its influence on the Holy See is exaggerated.
The current prelate of Opus Dei, Javier Echevarria, is preparing to beatify the previous head of the organization, Alvaro del Portillo, who died 20 years ago.
Masons
Rumors that eerie mystical rites were held in the centers of Opus Dei, and the walls of their churches were covered with Kabbalistic signs, began to spread in the late 1930s, and the organization became known as a "secret heretical society of the Masonic warehouse." In 1941, the tribunal established by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco began to investigate the connection between the "Cause of God" and the Freemasons, but the trial never began.
The following year, the Falangists published a Confidential Report on the Secret Organization Opus Dei, which stated that the organization's hidden goal was to oppose the Spanish state. The governor of Barcelona, Antonio Correa Veglison, saw the members of the organization as something of an Illuminati sect. In some Spanish cities, public burning of the book "The Way" took place. General of the Jesuit Society Wlodzimierz Leduchowski wrote a report for the Vatican, in which he noted that inside Opus Dei one can find "signs of a secret inclination to rule the world through a kind of Christian Freemasonry."
In the second half of the 1980s, the Italian parliament was investigating Opus Dei, which was supposed to determine his belonging to secret societies. As a result, he came to the conclusion that “Opus Dei is not a secret organization, neither in the legal nor in the factual sense,” since everyone knows the address of their headquarters in Milan, as well as the telephone number of the Rome information office. After a while, however, a Swiss newspaper was charged with Opus Dei, and a federal court in Lausanne declared it a secret organization. In 1996, Opus Dei entered the list of 172 French sects.
Mortification of the flesh
After the release of the film adaptation of Dan Brown's book "The Da Vinci Code", in which the members of Opus Dei are presented as fanatics torturing themselves half to death, periodically killing people, the real members of the organization had to debunk the myths created around it for a long time. For example, a Catholic priest and a member of Opus Dei O. Michael Barrett explained that the church from time immemorial used various methods of mortifying the flesh, and "God's work" only adopted this tradition. Bodily repentance, contrary to the prevailing stereotype, does not cause any harm to human health or appearance, but only creates "relatively little discomfort", which helps to focus on serving God and draw closer to Christ.
Hair shirt and "discipline". Photo: Nancy Palmieri / Bloomberg / Getty Images / Fotobank.ru
The mortification of the flesh is practiced by the celibate members of Opus Dei. For two hours a day they wear a hair shirt - a metal chain with spikes tied around their thighs, and once a week for several minutes they whip themselves with a whip of woolen threads, which is called "discipline." During self-flagellation, one is supposed to read the prayer "Our Father" or "Ave, Maria!"
According to Barrett, these practices are of secondary importance, and in the first place for any Christian is love for one's neighbor. "Opus Dei emphasizes the role of small rather than large mortifications of the flesh, such as continuing to work despite fatigue, being punctual, denying oneself small pleasures, food and drink, refraining from complaints," he said on the organization's official website.
As stated in The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei owns a luxurious new seventeen-story building, which houses the organization's headquarters. It is located in New York City at 243 Lexington Avenue. There is no sign on it. Inside the building are two chapels, a library, conference rooms, living quarters and dining rooms. According to the almanac published in the Vatican, there are thirty thousand Opus Dei members in the United States, and about sixty branches of this organization are scattered throughout the North American continent. Opus Dei has always attracted attention due to its obviously considerable wealth. Among those who can be called sympathizers, there are many very rich people, it is clear that they donate large sums to Opus Dei. Many of them are not Catholics, but they see Opus Dei as an organization thatready to seriously defend the dogmas of the Christian faith and oppose all its opponents.
Criticism
Opus Dei has received the most varied criticism, but most often it lacks serious grounds. The most recent and widespread examples of such criticism are at the same time the most unfounded from an objective point of view, although very popular. So after the publication of the book and film "The Da Vinci Code" many noticed that secrecy is a good investment and did not hesitate to label "Opus Dei" as a secret organization. A glaring example of this is the cover of the Russian translation of the book of the famous American Vaticanist John Alley "Opus Dei", published by the publishing house "Exmo" in 2007. To lure buyers, the publishers placed the following annotation on the cover: "The history of the" Papal Intelligence "and the sinister secrets of the most secret Catholic society "Opus Dei, Truth and Fiction."
At the same time, the annotation to the American edition says: “Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church” (“Opus Dei” an objective view of the myths and reality of the most controversial force of the Catholic Church "). For some reason, the cover of the Russian version differs markedly from the English original. To interest the reader, i.e. in order to get as much profit as possible, the publishers obscure this topic, denigrating the prelature and monstrously distorting reality and also put on the cover: "Opus Dei" portrays Christian militants as a totalitarian terrorist organization."
The Russian-speaking reader, anticipating great secrets, will be disappointed: after reading only the first pages of the book, he will understand that the promise of the cover was a lie: “When the publishing house“Doubleday”first spoke to me about this project, I turned to the Roman headquarters with some trepidation.” Opus Dei”, referring to his legendary reputation as a secret organization. I said that I was going to write a book about “Opus Dei” and would like to know if they agree to collaborate. Having immediately received a positive answer, I signed a contract with the publishing house and started working. For the sake of fairness, I must say that Opus Dei has never violated our contractual obligations of full disclosure”(pp. 15-16). At the end of the book, the author sums up the results: “Opus Dei is not deliberately“secret”. The composition of “Opus Dei” officials and the addresses of its centers are published in the press, its activities fall under the relevant legal guidelines, and its information offices answer almost any question asked”(pp. 451-452). Among the critics of the prelature today there are those who call "Opus Dei" a sect.
But in this case, it would be difficult to explain the fact that in 2002 the founder of the organization was canonized in St. Peter the Great by Pope John Paul II in the presence of many cardinals and bishops, and a large number of high-ranking representatives of the Church thanked the "Cause" for the work it is doing around the world. The accusation of sectarianism weakly agrees with the fact that at the moment the processes of canonization of 11 members of Opus Dei are underway, bishops from all over the world are asking the prelate to start the work of the Cause in their dioceses, in Rome, under the auspices of the organization, there is a papal university, among its members there are two cardinals and many bishops, etc. Other forms of criticism are older. When the founder, in the early forties, preached a universal calling to holiness, there were those who began to declare him a heretic,because the laity are allegedly not called to holiness, which is unattainable for people living in the world.
In those same years, he was accused of being unpatriotic, since he did not want to have anything to do with the political parties that were then in power in Spain. Others, on the other hand, seeing several Opus Dei members in the Franco government, attributed the organization a sympathy for fascism and a desire for power. In fact, the founder has always emphasized that Opus Dei members have the same political freedom as all other Catholics and can adhere to whatever political convictions they like best, since Delo is a religious, not a political organization: The Catholic Church in Spain has never forbidden to cooperate with the Franco regime and left the right of choice to each Catholic individually (including the members of "Opus Dei"). If consider,that over the past several years, gangs of republicans staged truly atrocious massacres of Catholics (12 bishops and 6 thousand priests and monastics were martyred) and that only Franco's victory allowed believers to come out of the underground, it is not surprising that the majority of Spanish Catholics, i.e. most of the Spaniards supported the Franco government. Moreover, among the members of Opus Dei were Franco's ministers and his opponents, who were forced to leave the country. Moreover, among the members of Opus Dei were Franco's ministers and his opponents, who were forced to leave the country. Moreover, among the members of Opus Dei were Franco's ministers and his opponents, who were forced to leave the country.
Even more amusing, but this makes the accusation of links with Freemasonry no less ridiculous. “In the 1940s, Fr. Josemaria was indicted before the Tribunal for the Suppression of Communism and Freemasonry. This was a very serious charge in post-war Spain. Suffice it to say that the death penalty was threatened for involvement in Freemasonry. At the meeting of the tribunal, Opus Dei was called “the Judaic branch of Freemasonry,” “a Jewish sect in connection with the Freemasons”. After stating the reasons for the charge, one of the tribunal members said: "It must be admitted that the members of Opus Dei are hardworking and lead a chaste life." This provoked an immediate reaction from the chairman of the tribunal, the formidable General Saliquet: “If they really lead a chaste life, then they are not Masons. I have not known chaste Masons”. And announced the closure of the case "(Evgeniy Pazukhin," St. Josemaria Escriva,founder of Opus Dei, p. 104-105, St. Petersburg, 2009).
In conclusion, it can be said that, with the exception of some former members who are offended by other members of the "Delo", criticism stems from two groups. The first consists of people free from remorse who, in pursuit of easy money, pass off Opus Dei as a secret conspiratorial organization. The second includes those who attack the Catholic Church and its institutions because they uphold such Christian principles as the indissolubility of marriage and the traditional family consisting of a man and a woman, rejection of abortion and euthanasia, condemnation of homosexuality, etc.