Oscar Wilde once ironically described an acquaintance as “an excellent man” whom, he said, “has no enemies and none of his friends like him.”
Adjusting Wilde’s aphorism, I would say that a Catholic institution like Opus Dei that has such fierce enemies must also have some friends who like it very much. A more direct line from Winston Churchill probably meant the same thing: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Such thoughts came to mind after slogging through the latest example of Opus Dei hate-writing: “Opus” by Gareth Gore (Simon & Schuster, $30.99).
The subtitle of the book is a series of unfriendly characterizations: “The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church.” All inflammatory, and all untrue.
In multiple YouTube appearances promoting the book, Gore has claimed that he has nothing against Catholics. He might have fooled me, had I not actually read his book.
Gore says he was raised without religion because his Irish father was disgusted with Catholicism as a “religion of guilt.” That he presents this as a bona fide to demonstrate his objectivity about the Church indicates where he is on the religious spectrum.
A financial reporter, Gore says that he began his investigation into Opus Dei because he had reported on the collapse of a Spanish bank, the Banco Popular, whose CEO for a long time was a numerary of Opus Dei. He concludes that the bank fell apart because it was used to siphon off billions to various projects of the personal prelature of Opus Dei.
Only late in the book do we find a reference to a sharp decline in property values, which has led independent experts to tie the collapse of the bank to the “mortgage mania” like in the U.S. crisis of 2008 (“toxic home loans, moldering on its books all these years were a major cause of its collapse,” according to one), but Gore is only interested in the Banco Popular because he was able to contact disgruntled ex-employees, including the former CEO’s brother.
From ex-employees, Gore moved on to anyone who had any complaint about Opus Dei, its founder St. Josemaría Escrivá, or the saint’s successor, Blessed Álvaro Del Portillo. Apparently ignorant of Catholic theology, Gore suggests that the canonization of St. Josemaría’s canonization and Don Álvaro’s beatification should be retracted. Rather than venerated, he says, they should be excommunicated. A nonbeliever advocating for the excommunication of dead people the Catholic Church holds to be in heaven is just a taste of the irony of the author’s pretended objectivity.
Gore rehashes criticisms used years ago by opponents of St. Josemaría’s canonization, enthusiastically demonstrating his optimism that fortiter calumniare, aliquid adhaerebit as the old Latin saying has it, “throw enough dirt and something will stick.”
He is not fair about anything to do with Opus Dei. He refers to an early criticism that theologian Hans Urs von Baltasar made of “the Work” (as it is often called in English) but does not mention his retraction and apology years later. Late Australian Cardinal George Pell is called “Pedo Pell,” and Gore tells us that Opus Dei priests visited the prelate in prison, but he neglects to add that the cardinal won his case on appeal and was exonerated.
Aristotle once wrote that rhetoric is not about dialectical reasoning, but about persuasion, often involving much emotion and the excitement of pity and fear. Gore describes many who feel themselves victims of Opus Dei and its members, but the worst cases he cites lack the corroborating endnotes found in other anecdotes.
Aristotle also believed that an orator should know the prejudices of his hearers, and Gore’s ideal audience are those who find any traditional ascetical practices strange, who see vowed obedience to superiors as threatening, and who dissent from modern liberal views about sexual liberation and abortion. He sees Opus Dei behind the overturning of Roe v. Wade and gives the impression that he expects his readers to agree that the Dobbs decision was the greatest tragedy of modern civilization.
Some of his chapters about American political life and the influence of conservative Catholics end with cliffhangers in the style of potboilers. At a Supreme Court Christmas party, a guest cleric sat at the piano and “the Justices — the most powerful legal figures in America — sang along to the tune played by the Opus Dei priest.” They actually sang some traditional Christmas carols! “It was a dark portent for what was to come,” Gore writes. If the text had a soundtrack, it would be like that of the movie Jaws when the main character approached the beach.
The word scandalmonger says little for a man of Gore’s talent. He mixes real scandals with what he regards as a greater scandal, which includes every successful initiative of the prelature.
At various points, “Opus” reads like the work of someone who keeps a copy of Dan Brown’s hit 2003 novel “The Da Vinci Code” close by so he can reread its reassuring heretical fantasia of the Catholic plot to cover up Jesus’ lack of divinity, his marriage to St. Mary Magdalen, and the children he had by her whose descendants have a clandestine existence to this day.
Gore’s nightmare is that Opus Dei is trying to take over the world. He writes darkly that the prelature imagines “the re-Christianization [sic] of the whole world.” This re-Christianization effort might surprise the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and people of other religions who make up most of the world’s population.
Gore’s relentless and acid antipathy to the spirituality of saints and his creative retelling of the history of Opus Dei make me think the book’s publishers should have marketed the book as a novel.
It is not as smooth as “The DaVinci Code,” but it does share the same carefree attitude toward factual accuracy. The revolutionary Nicaraguan activist priest Ernesto Cardenal is referred to as a cardinal, a dean at the University of Navarre in Spain is called a “deacon.”
These are minor details compared to Brown’s murderous albino monk, prowling London dressed like the hunchback of Notre Dame, and all the goofy art criticism and “historical” stuff of “The DaVinci Code.” But surfacing in Gore’s so-called “business” reporting they are annoying reminders of journalistic mediocrity.
Thankfully, no one is going to praise Gore’s prose style, and penitents who might want to suffer through his writing would be better off sticking with traditional forms of asceticism.
