Funny events in anti-woke world
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Taliban minister declares women’s voices among women forbidden
amu.tv
Taliban minister declares women’s voices among women forbidden | Amu TV
The ministry’s new rules demand that women cover all parts of their bodies, including their faces, and now restrict their voices even within the home.
amu.tv
Well, when your twisted view of religion blames women for being the cause of men's sins, but men keep being sinful no matter how much you control women, you've gotta keep tightening the screws. What else are you gonna do? Blame men?!Taliban minister declares women’s voices among women forbidden
Taliban minister declares women’s voices among women forbidden | Amu TV
The ministry’s new rules demand that women cover all parts of their bodies, including their faces, and now restrict their voices even within the home.
Jeff Bezos bought WaPo to gain political influence. With the rise of Trump, he's now found its centre-left inclinations a political threat to the massive government contracts and lack of government oversight that he makes a fortune off.
You see, Bezos can write that self-serving shit... just about the only thing that's honest about it is that he is indeed a complexifier for the newspaper. We might note that the LA Times, also owned by a billionaire whose other business affairs could be massively disrupted by a vengeful president, had its endorsement pulled too.
Even the internal logic is flawed. If a presidential endorsement by a newspaper is irrelevant and not going to shift any voters, then the newspaper isn't going to earn any trust from them by not endorsing a president either. Those people stopped caring what the newspaper said long before the endorsement, when they saw articles opposing world views and policies they believed in. The way the newspaper wins their attention is by telling them how great and awesome they and everything they believe in is: and thereby junking their old audience in the process.
Vatican going anime
comicbook.com
The Vatican Goes Full Anime With New Catholic Mascot: Watch Now
When it comes to anime, the sky is the limit. The industry churns out billions of dollars each year in profit, and its reach is expanding by the day. From television to film and gaming, anime is everywhere. As it turns out, anime is also in the Catholic Church as The Vatican just learned on […]
comicbook.com
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They gotta get the youth somehow. I'm still waiting for the pope to do fortnite dances.Vatican going anime
The Vatican Goes Full Anime With New Catholic Mascot: Watch Now
When it comes to anime, the sky is the limit. The industry churns out billions of dollars each year in profit, and its reach is expanding by the day. From television to film and gaming, anime is everywhere. As it turns out, anime is also in the Catholic Church as The Vatican just learned on […]
Blue hair!? I thought the Vatican was anti-gay.Vatican going anime
The Vatican Goes Full Anime With New Catholic Mascot: Watch Now
When it comes to anime, the sky is the limit. The industry churns out billions of dollars each year in profit, and its reach is expanding by the day. From television to film and gaming, anime is everywhere. As it turns out, anime is also in the Catholic Church as The Vatican just learned on […]
Oh Lord Jesus, one of 'm has pink hair!
Specifically prohibited by the Bible: "Thou shalt not perform the floss."
I fear there are substantial number of Christian groups for which that's not true.
Relevent and recent church/us politics shenanigans released this month
slate.com
Sam from Majority Report interviewed the journalist yesterday bout it but doesn't seem to be clipped up on the youtubes yet.
Supreme court funsies
The Da Vinci Code Made Them Famous. That Was Just the Beginning.
Opus Dei came out of the fascist era in Spain. It’s not going away any time soon.
Sam from Majority Report interviewed the journalist yesterday bout it but doesn't seem to be clipped up on the youtubes yet.
More Catholic Than the Church
What Opus Dei is up to in 2024.
By Molly Olmstead
Oct 28, 202411:00 AM
A poster in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican shows Opus Dei founder Jose María Escrivá in 2002. Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
Most Americans, if they have heard of the organization Opus Dei, know it because of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code, a 2003 thriller in which the primary villain is an Opus Dei assassin, an albino monk who kills to protect his cult. But Opus Dei is an actual Catholic group still active today, and while it has no albino monks (actually, no monks at all), its real history contains enough dark deeds—as detailed in a newly published exposé by the British journalist Gareth Gore—that it needs no help from fiction to be fit for outlandish conspiracy theories.
Gore’s book Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, which was published in the U.S. on Oct. 1, contains a shocking number of sinister allegations about the organization, which emerged from fascist Spain through a close alliance with the Franco regime. Gore describes financial crimes, sexual abuse, the grooming and coercion of recruits, the drugging of members, human trafficking, and even slavery.
“For so many of the things that I uncovered in the book, if I didn’t have the actual documents in my hands before me, I just wouldn’t believe it,” Gore told Slate. “You’d think this was entirely made up.”
Gore, a financial journalist, took a follow-the-money approach to his investigations, and after five years of reporting, he concluded that Opus Dei remains “a very powerful organization to this day”—particularly in the United States. The modern Opus Dei advances a right-wing Christian agenda, and in the U.S., it promotes deeply reactionary policies through its ties to immensely powerful figures in politics and the judiciary.
To learn more about the modern Opus Dei, Slate spoke with Gore about his reporting, how Opus Dei became so powerful in the U.S., and why Gore believes that it will be at the center of the “next big” Catholic scandal. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Slate: How does a financial reporter end up writing a book about a secretive religious organization?
Gareth Gore: I fell into this story completely by accident through a Spanish bank that had collapsed in 2017. I found myself in Madrid two years later and noticed the legal saga was still ongoing. There were more than 100 legal cases pending, all of these shareholders and bondholders trying to get their money back from this big bank. The thing that led me to Opus Dei was this mysterious foundation that had been the bank’s largest shareholder. This group called themselves the Syndicate, and they seemed to vanish from the scene. While everyone else was fighting to get their money back, this one group was nowhere to be seen.
This Syndicate was made up of all of these seemingly independent nonprofits with quite innocuous-sounding names, like the Foundation for Social Action and the Institutes for Education and Investigation. Many of them were registered at the same address, and they seemed to share the same shareholders and the same cast of seemingly interchangeable men who went from one foundation to another. I met a former chairman of the bank, and he told me: It’s Opus Dei.
Can you explain what Opus Dei is and how it’s different from other Catholic groups?
Opus Dei was founded by this Spanish priest Jose María Escrivá in 1928. He went around telling everybody that he’d received this vision from God for a new organization that would allow ordinary Catholics to live out their faith more seriously. The foundational philosophy was that these people could serve God by offering everything they did in their everyday lives up to heaven. This was designed for people who wanted a bit more from their faith, but who didn’t necessarily want to become priests or nuns; it was kind of a middle way for them to be more serious about Catholicism.
But in the early years of Opus Dei, the organization began to evolve quite dramatically. This was in Spain in the early 1930s—a country that’s on the brink of civil war. The workers were rising up, demanding new rights for themselves. They were also, critically, turning their backs on the church and starting to ask questions about the church’s role in the suppression of the masses.
Escrivá, this priest, saw what was happening around him, and he was horrified. So he began to evolve the organization in secret. He drew up this deeply political, reactionary, militant manifesto. His followers were going to be part of this guerrilla army that would infiltrate every part of society from government to the judiciary, to education, academia, journalism, and business. They would then use their positions to collect information on the enemies of Christ, and then carry out the orders of Christ—those were his words. And of course, the orders of Christ would come through Escrivá.
So what began as an organization with benign aims transformed very quickly into a very political movement, and it remains so today. It still maintains this friendly public-facing side, but it has this hidden underbelly that’s riddled with abuse, manipulation, and militant politicization.
What kinds of abuse and manipulation are you talking about? Can you tell me how you personally came across these allegations?
One day in the [bank’s] archive, the archivist took me aside and said, “By the way, there’s a whole pile of papers over here that we haven’t yet been able to classify. We found them in this mansion up in the hills outside of Madrid, where the chairman used to live.” He told me that it was quite clear to him that someone had cleansed this secret cache of material of anything that was too incriminating.
But it was there that I discovered this one document that detailed exactly where the money from the bank had gone—including to this school in Argentina where teenagers had been coerced into a life of servitude. A news story published by the Associated Press [in 2021] detailed the plight of these 42 women in Argentina who had alleged that they’d been coerced into joining Opus Dei as teenagers, entrapped into a life cooking and cleaning for the elite members of Opus Dei. I began to realize that my story was [partially] about the hidden financing network that Opus Dei used to entrap young girls into this horrible life of servitude.
It wasn’t only happening in Argentina. There were dozens of other schools around the world that had been set up using the bank’s money to do similar things. Schools in places like the Philippines, Nigeria, Kenya, and Belgium were all set up to recruit girls from impoverished backgrounds into this life of servitude. I’ve spoken to many women who’ve been through this system, who’ve had exactly the same experience, and I think that as investigators and authorities begin to look into this more, they’re going to uncover a huge network of schools being used to recruit, coerce, and traffic these young girls.
In recent days, federal prosecutors in Argentina have filed formal accusations against Opus Dei of trafficking teenage girls. Four Opus Dei priests will stand trial in Argentina. I know for a fact that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think this is going to be the next big church scandal.
You’re also clear that Opus Dei is not representative of the larger church. What is its relationship with the Vatican?
For decades, Opus Dei had a very difficult relationship with the church. Escrivá got into numerous fights with different popes because he felt the Vatican wasn’t giving Opus Dei the respect that it deserved. But the breakthrough for them came in ’78, when Pope John Paul II was elected. Before he became pope, they’d thrown money at him, printed many of his speeches and books, hosted him at conferences, and developed quite a close relationship with him. He rewarded Opus Dei by giving them this special status within the church that allowed Opus Dei to operate outside of the usual hierarchy of the church. So it was only ever answerable to the pope. To this date, they’re the only [such organization] in the entire 2,000-year history of the church.
Its founder, Escrivá, is now officially a saint, which he was named in 2002. You write that the rushed and controversial canonization came about largely through a heavy-handed campaign by Opus Dei. But you note that Pope Francis has a more fraught relationship with the organization.
The [current] pope has fired a couple of warning shots, basically ordering the organization to get its house in order, but Opus Dei has completely ignored the warnings. We’re now in this kind of weird standoff. He knows that its ranks are riddled with abuse, and I believe he wants to do something about it, but he’s treading very carefully, because Opus Dei is very powerful and has very powerful and wealthy allies. But make no mistake, the pope absolutely recognizes the need to do something, and I believe he will do something.
One of the things that I enjoyed in reading your book was coming across terms like “the Syndicate”—details that feel out of a thriller. So I have to ask about The Da Vinci Code. Did the book change things for Opus Dei?
Dan Brown flagged a number of real allegations against Opus Dei, like its abuse, the manipulation of members, and members’ practice of self-flagellation. He also made up huge amounts of the book, and Opus Dei spun that to huge advantage. One very senior member of Opus Dei in the United States told me that Da Vinci Code was the best thing that ever happened to Opus Dei, at least in the States, because it gave them huge amounts of media attention, which they used to pump out this friendly message. They managed to use that to recruit a lot more members.
OK, now let’s turn to the U.S. specifically. Do you have a sense of how big Opus Dei is here?
Officially, Opus Dei has 3,000 members in the United States. Now, this is a Catholic organization, so you would expect those members to be concentrated in cities with large Catholic populations, like Chicago, Boston, or New York. But that’s not the case. The largest community of Opus Dei members is actually in Washington, D.C., which I think tells you everything you need to know about the way the organization operates and the type of people that it seeks to recruit. Eight hundred of the 3,000 Opus Dei members are in the D.C. area. That’s the result of decades of Opus Dei pumping its resources into penetrating the city. It’s always sought to infiltrate the corridors of power.
In the book, you detail concerted efforts by Opus Dei priests to form friendships with wealthy and powerful men in Washington. So how successful has it been in its goal of “infiltrating the corridors of power” in D.C.?
So many of the Washington political and judicial elite are tied to Opus Dei in some way. In the late ’80s, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a regular at the Opus Dei retreats outside of Washington. Leonard Leo, who almost single-handedly has masterminded this radical conservative and Catholic takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court, is a director at the Opus Dei hub in central Washington, this place called the Catholic Information Center. Other people who have been on the board of directors there include the former Attorney General Bill Barr and former White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Mick Mulvaney, who was Trump’s chief of staff for a while, is an Opus Dei member. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025, is a regular at Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center. He gets his spiritual direction from the Opus Dei priest there. He’s made speeches about Escrivá being this inspirational leader.
I have to stress that the book does not imply in any way that there’s some guy in Rome issuing orders down to the likes of Bill Barr or Leonard Leo or Mick Mulvaney. What I’m saying is we should look at Opus Dei not as a religious organization but as a network of like-minded archconservative radicals who in many instances use the beliefs to push forward a deeply political agenda.
On top of the social connections through Opus Dei that these conservative Catholic powerful people in D.C. have, there’s a financial element to the network. You write about Opus Dei as both a beneficiary and source of some of the dark money going through Washington. How relevant is Opus Dei to the movement of dark money in U.S. politics?
The way it operates around the world, Opus Dei has hundreds and hundreds of these arm’s-length nonprofits, foundations, and charities, which officially have nothing at all to do with the organization, but which in reality have everything to do with the organization. Opus Dei decides who sits on the boards. It often makes the decisions on behalf of these foundations, frequently without the directors themselves even knowing.
In the U.S. alone, I identified almost 100 different foundations with assets of around a billion dollars between them. Generally, these things are used to fund Opus Dei residences or Opus Dei initiatives, like schools. But occasionally they’re also put to political use.
So for example, this network of foundations has been used to fund what Opus Dei has described as a beachhead onto Ivy League campuses. They have also been used to fight abortion and same-sex marriage. I found instances where these Opus Dei–linked foundations were behind all kinds of campaigns and lobbying efforts. This goes back as far as the ’90s. One Opus Dei–linked institution was basically behind getting Prop 8 onto ballots in California—it was an alliance between Opus Dei and the Mormon church. They did this through these dark money vehicles, which officially had nothing to do with Opus Dei.
In more recent years, it’s been a recipient of Leonard Leo’s network of money funds. A couple years back, Leo became the beneficiary of this $1.6 billion [gift] from this industrialist, and he’s used it to fund political initiatives, and Opus Dei has received some of that money. And it’s not just Leo. Opus Dei has cozied up to a group of archconservative radical Catholics, many of whom are openly hostile to the pope, and received large sums from these people in order to advance this very political, anti-progressive, reactionary agenda.
One very minor detail in your book that I found interesting was that Opus Dei was incentivizing young men to enroll in their seminary schools—to train the next generation of priests to fill the church’s ranks during an ongoing priest shortage. This could result in increasingly conservative messaging coming from within parish churches. The idea I came away with, reading that, was that there is a long game of influence to push Catholics in a more culturally conservative direction. Is that a fair takeaway?
Yeah, I think it’s fair to see Opus Dei as a very efficient pipeline that churns out these ultra-conservative, radically politicized individuals. So for me, one of the most dangerous things about Opus Dei is that it has this legitimacy from the Catholic Church. So many ordinary Catholics, when approached by Opus Dei, see an official institution of the church. They let their guard down. They welcome this organization into their homes. They hand over their children to be educated by this organization, not knowing about this hidden underbelly of manipulation and abuse. It’s high time that the Vatican did something about that, because there are a lot of good-hearted, devout Catholics out there who’ve been duped by this organization.
Have you heard any response to your book from within Opus Dei?
Any normal organization, when presented with these serious accusations of human trafficking, of abuse, of grooming minors, would take them very seriously and immediately mount an internal investigation. That is not what has happened with Opus Dei. What it’s done is use its money and influence to mount this really aggressive smear campaign against me. They’ve created all of these snazzy videos where they call me a liar, and they imply that I’m a journalist-for-hire, that someone’s paid me to put this book together. It’s a distraction strategy, and it’s working quite well in some of the Catholic press and in some conservative press in Spain.
I’ve noticed that often when someone criticizes the Catholic Church over the sex abuse crisis and other scandals, certain conservative Catholic groups tend to claim that the critics are bigots, that they’re prejudiced against faithful Catholics.
It’s a common line of attack. It’s one that [Leonard] Leo uses quite frequently. It’s one that Opus Dei has used against me. But, I’m sorry, it’s lazy, and it’s really disrespectful to the literally hundreds of people who’ve said they’ve been abused by this organization for decades.
Opus Dei has known about these allegations for decades and has done nothing about it. The leadership of the organization has proven, time and time again, to be unwilling or unable to reform itself.
But I should say, I think this is just the start of the story. I spent five years on this project, but I’m just one guy, and I think the book has only just scratched the surface of the abuses that have been allowed to fester within the organization for so long. And what I hope the book does is inspire other investigative journalists to begin to look into the organization more deeply in their own countries.
Supreme court funsies
- Feb 7, 2011
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- 3 children in a trench coat
When your attack ads are so bad affiliates are calling for content warnings...
Ok, people have already said it, but that was quite the set up line there.
Vatican going anime
The Vatican Goes Full Anime With New Catholic Mascot: Watch Now
When it comes to anime, the sky is the limit. The industry churns out billions of dollars each year in profit, and its reach is expanding by the day. From television to film and gaming, anime is everywhere. As it turns out, anime is also in the Catholic Church as The Vatican just learned on […]