Seize the Dei
Friday evening saw the visit of Jack Valero, the representative for Opus Dei in the UK, to the Oxford Union. The organization has chosen their public representative well, the tall, tanned Spaniard, a picture of affability and moderation. He talked for over an hour on the origins of Opus Dei, focusing in particular on the association’s reaction to The Da Vinci Code and the group’s attempts to dispel Dan Brown’s depiction of it.
For those readers who have managed to evade the all-encompassing presence of both the book and the film, Opus Dei is represented as a secretive and sinister organisation tasked with protecting the great secrets of the Catholic Church, confidences so significant that the group is prepared to murder in order to keep them concealed.
Allied to this, the central Opus Dei character within the book, Silas the murderous albino monk, is hardly a sympathetic rendering of a member of Opus Dei, and the group have mounted a number of objections to the book’s claims. If The Da Vinci Code’s depiction is thus as claimed not entirely accurate, we are left to consider the reality.
Founded in 1928 by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá, now a saint, the name translates as God’s Work a phrase that encapsulates the movement’s attitude towards sanctity through ordinary life. Every individual should aim towards sainthood, a distinction that may be achieved not necessarily through a grand sacrifice but equally via a devotion to the minutiae of life. Opus Dei claims an international membership of 87,000, a miniscule percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, although as Mr Valero says the organisation is “still very young. The Benedictines have been around for four hundred years.” Within the organisation 98% are lay people of which just over half are female. The members are considered on an equal footing within the group although subdivided into supernumeraries, who are married or express the desire to marry, and numeraries, who remain celibate for religious reasons.
There are no monks, they are by definition already members of other religious groups. The split is approximately two-thirds to three-quarters in favour of the former, the organisation centres on religious life in the home.
Devotees of The Da Vinci Code will be glad to know that a certain amount of self-mortification does take place within the organisation, although this is essentially limited to the occasional wearing of the Cilice, a rather uncomfortable garter worn by numeraries for two hours a day. The organisation has developed the rather useful soundbite that this is less painful “than a workout in the gym”, something that Mr Valero was keen to repeat.
The practice should also apparently be viewed in context, part of the Catholic tradition of self-punishment. In all seriousness, however, beyond the founder’s apparent tendency to flog himself on occasion until blood stained the floor (this represented a personal preference and one not to be imitated), self-punishment manifests itself within the organisation manifests only in this limited manner.
That the reality of Opus Dei is so dramatically different from Dan Brown’s depiction leads one to wonder what influenced the author’s decision to figure the group in the manner that he does. Mr Valero believes this stems from Dan brown “exaggerating to the nth degree” things which people “did not know about”. Both statements are a source for some concern.
The real danger in regard to both The Da Vinci Code and Opus Dei’s response lies in objectivity becoming subsumed beneath the counterclaims of these clashing phenomenons. While Dan Brown’s book is almost entirely fallacious, its effect is to establish a kind of alternative mythography to the Catholic Church, one that Opus Dei disputes virulently.
Yet the sheer inaccuracy of the book’s criticisms allows the organisation to use it almost as a shield, pointing to the factual and logical mistakes within the work as examples of discrimination. The book is used by the group to embody the criticisms against it, a disparagement that can easily be dismissed through the exercise of logical thought and thus the organization is able to emerge with reputation intact.
While, however, Opus Dei are clearly not a group of massmurdering fundamentalists, they do nevertheless represent an ambitious conservative movement at the centre of religious and political life within the Catholic church.
While they merit no more particular consideration than any other movement, and in purely numerical terms represent one of the smallest factions, they are nevertheless embroiled in the complexities of clerical politics and a number of controversies that merit genuine consideration on behalf of the media and other concerned parties.
There are accusations of unnecessary secrecy while its influence on contemporary Britain is demonstrated by Ruth Kelly’s recent assertion that she turns to the teachings of the group for spiritual guidance. While the assessment of these issues may not be as exciting or dramatic as Brown’s conspiracy theories, they are authentic. It is vital that the media and the public do not allow the erroneous claims of The Da Vinci Code to affect their analytical powers in respect to Opus Dei.
Essentially, the book is a work of fiction and should be treated as such, while Opus Dei is a rather unglamorous reality and must be thought of with the same set of thorough considerations that would be applied to any other socio-religious organisation.
1st Jun 2006