Untold: Opus Dei - Opus Dei, Ep. 2: Formation

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Opus Dei’s founder taught his followers that spiritual formation is a continual development of character. But some find that the views spread by Opus Dei do not always match the Church’s official teaching – particularly its attitudes towards women and homosexuality. Insiders describe a complex youth recruitment network that offers some clues to the kind of person Opus Dei molds – and what kind of person it is interested in.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You walk into the chapel. It's cool and quiet, peaceful. You pass a portrait of St. José Maria Escriver, the founder of Opus Day. A saintly golden ring floats above his head. There is an altar made of marble or wood. Heavy gold candles and a cross sit on top. The front of the altar is engraved with a symbol, a circle with a cross inside it, the insignia of Opus Day. You take your seat in a pew of polished dark wood. The space is simple, but traditional.

It smells faintly of incense. There are other people there, but not many. They are all the same sex as you. Men or women, never both. An Opus Day priest stands before you. Everyone kneels. And the priest begins the meditation, a guided mental prayer. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here,

that you see me, that you see me, that you're not. hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. The priest sits, and then? They dim the lights to sort of just allow for a total concentration on your prayer. He speaks for an hour. It's easy to forget the others around you are there. You're sitting in a dark room with very dim lighting being softly spoken to, almost as if it was close to hypnosis. The priest is teaching you how to be a better Christian.

I remember feeling very inspired at times. and very scared in other times. This is just the start of your evening in an Opus Day centre. After the meditation, there's an opportunity for confession. Then you attend talks given by numery members, celibate members of Opus Day. Sometimes it was a class on the spirit of Opus Day. Sometimes it would be focused on a particular virtue.

For these talks, you move from the chapel to the living room, where you sit in chairs or sofas. The numery takes the lessons out of the religious text, and applies them to real life, like how to make the best use of your time, how to pray, how to dress, and behave modestly. You consider the work of famous philosophers and theologians, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine.

But above all, you're immersed in the writings of the Opus Day founder, a scriver. Opus Day is made in his image, shaped by his specific outlook on faith, on life. A specific way of viewing the truth. church, a way of viewing the world, a way of viewing their relationship with politics, their way of viewing business. It's not just Catholic teaching, it's the Opus Day spin on Catholic teaching. In these weekly sessions, there's one thing you rarely see anyone do. There's no questions allowed. There's no disagreement allowed. There's no conversation. It's simply you sit there and you're told to think of this way.

You do not challenge what you're being taught. From the Financial Times, I'm Antonia Kundi. This is Untold, Opus Day. Episode 2, Formation. Opus Day's founder, Escriver, taught his followers that spiritual formation is a lifelong effort, a continual development of character. Our formation never ends, he told them, like a river slowly shaping a fragment of broken glass until it's smooth.

To understand how Opus Day has influenced America, you have to first understand how it shapes individuals. That's what I'm going to tell you about in this episode. Because Opus Day is bringing a particularly conservative and restrictive form of Catholicism into the American mainstream to people like Catherine. By the end of the week, I had really, really enjoyed myself. Catherine got involved with Opus Day through one of their residential summer camps in Missouri.

It was 2008 and she was 11. I was definitely hooked. I told my mom as soon as she picked me up that I wanted to go back next year. At camp, Catherine picked berries, did arts and crafts, and prayed. She returned year after year as she moved into her teens. The spiritual formation gently increased. They started in middle school introducing us to the concepts of purity and not just like virginity, although that was included, but overall, like being a holy and pure young. lady. When we went to sign up for camp, they would send a list with a lot of really specific

modesty rules for clothing. The rules were specific. Like what kind of swimsuit the girls could wear, one pieces only, or the minimum length for skirts, four fingertips above the knee. This wasn't Catherine's first encounter with modest dressing. Her mom was a devout Catholic. But the rules from Catherine's Opus Day summer camp took things to a different level, one that seeped into her own family's behavior from then on. I don't know that anyone in our family had seen rules laid out so clearly and specifically for it before, and that really started a period for us of being much more aware and serious about it. And what did you, at the time, what did you understand was the reason for dressing in this way?

What I remember understanding is that it was important to dress modestly and follow the rules so that we don't tempt any of the boys and men around us to sin with their thoughts. So we don't tempt the boys to sin with their thoughts. What Catherine said struck me, a young girl being taught that she was responsible for the sins of boys and men. As she got older, Catherine started attending an after-school club at the Opus Day Study Centre near home. And what she realised was that her mentors at the centre,

who she called the Opus Day ladies, weren't really a part of the wider Catholic community. They were almost like a church within a church. I remember being surprised and a little confused. They don't associate with their local parishes. They don't attend the masses there. Everything is in-house. When Catherine hit high school, her classes at the Opus Day Center intensified,

and the lessons on modesty introduced Opus Day's own peculiar explanations of men and women's psychology. It was very much the same messages every year, just slightly more complex. And it was, boys have extra struggles from being very visual, and that it was the kind and compassionate and thing to do. do for us to dress in a way that didn't make life harder for them. I remember thinking, at the time even, as a kid, do I really have to manage this for every male I'm ever around? This part of her formation really affected Catherine.

I started feeling constantly watched and constantly tired. She showed me some entries from her diary at the time, a blue Doctor Who notebook filled with a neat handwriting of a 17-year-old girl, wrestling with ideas. I know this is bad of me, and I know it's just evidence that I'm a fraud, but I can never seem to get into the spirit of the law because things never seem fair. It's just so different for us, girl-to-girl, because our bodies are different. Like, I'm lucky to have a really small behind and chest, and it's still hard. and we're actually also not supposed to just go the shapeless sack route because that also isn't dressing and carrying ourselves with dignity. It feels like there's no way to do this right, like there's no way to win.

Then, she worries about being alone with her brother-in-law. I sit there kind of wondering if one of these times when we're alone, without M or mom or dad, I'll be a little too attractive, or I won't comport myself right or something, and maybe that'll be the time that I tempt him to, strongly because I was lazy or I wanted to wear something cooler looking, and it's enough to make him sin, and it would be a train wreck in all my fault. At first, Catherine felt like Opus Day had expanded her spiritual life. But the teachings she encountered in a Scriber's organization

started to make her faith feel narrower. I never felt like I had opportunities to think when we would very rarely be given some time for quiet prayer or reflection or reading, they would pass out, you know, a basket of Jose Maria's, you know, writings. And I felt like I was getting the same information in programming every time. And I didn't like how specific things were in terms of a lot of the talks that we got about modesty and things like that. I was really tired of all that. So one day, when she was 18, Catherine cut ties with Opus Day. I just ended up saying like, I'm done, I'm done.

And I got the director of the center sent me a couple letters asking me to come back. But I didn't after that. I was raised Catholic. And I also remember being a frustrated teenager chafing against rules about what I could wear. But for Catherine, looking back now as a 28-year-old, She says the explanations for these concepts that Opus Day gave her were harmful, that she was led to believe that women needed controlling, not men. In recent decades, the Catholic Church has shifted away from this sort of language around modesty,

emphasising self-respect instead of shame or temptation. But Opus Day has doubled down on these reactionary views. And the more I spoke to other women who received Opus Day's formation, the more I heard similar patterns and more disturbing examples. One thing I've noticed more and more about Opus Day is it was really centered on making women the most subservient members of the family and of society. That was Grace Hearn, who attended a prestigious girls' school founded by Opus Day members in Washington, D.C. And this is a young woman I'm calling Mary, who left the same school around 2020.

It was pretty verbatim that it wasn't the responsibility. of the woman to understand politics or to have her own opinions. It was your husband's job to know all these things about politics and matters of the church. And like his job was to know things and your job was to just follow him. And this is Margaret Doran, who attended Opus Day activities for years. Female numeraries of Opus Day have to sleep on wooden boards every single day of their life. The men sleep on wooden boards, but only once a week. This goes straight back to Jose Maria Esgrava who said that women were more sensual. So they needed their desires to be more punished or reined in as they were. And this is, I believe, not authentically Catholic. And you have this really offensive dichotomy and the sort of freedoms men and women are allowed to have that doesn't seem to be able to be updated or changed. Because if St. Jose Maria said it, it must be right. And they're It can't be any argument on that.

In the U.S., Opus Day has been expanding its reach. More schools, more youth clubs, more exposure to the next generation. And the message that Opus Day is spreading to Americans goes back to its founder, Jose Maria Escriber. You wouldn't allow any descent. Any way you disagreed with anything he said, you were sent out immediately. That's Vladimir Feltzman. He's a Catholic priest based in London.

London. He's in his 80s now, but as a young man, he was very close to Escriver, the father of Opus Day. I was el mimado del Padre. Mimado. That's the favourite, the beloved of the father. Vlad has some fun memories of Escriver, but he said his methods were harsh, even by the standards of the time. He had a very strong temper. I remember he lost his temper on the phone when I was with him alone. I don't know with whom. And when it stopped, he said, remember Vlad, when I'm no longer here, tell people that the father knew how to laugh, but he also knew how to shout. There are several published books of Ascriber's writings

and reams of his other letters, homilies, notes and private remarks. Some of that legacy is tender, inspiring, but some is severe. When you joined Opus Day, it was never, as subsequently realized, other religious orders did, that the organisation was there to help you live your vocation If you joined Opus Day, your job was to learn to live Opus Day. There was a sort of template, and you had to become whatever it was to go through that template. That was your job. Lots of groups in individuals have their own approach to the faith,

like Mother Teresa, who devoted herself to loving the poor, and the Franciscan Order, who stressed duty to care for the natural world, or Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, a radical social activist. Escriber's formative message was first and foremost the sanctification of work, that doing one's professional work well can be a kind of prayer, a path to holiness. The Escriber's theology also had another emphasis, a more subtle but significant one, a focus on issues of sex and the family. From many points of view, he was obsessed with sex and sexuality,

and he held some very socially retrograde points of view. This is Jack, though that's not his real name. Jack didn't grow up religious, but he attended an independent school affiliated with Opus Day. There are ten of these schools across the U.S. Tens of thousands of children are introduced to Escriber's teachings through them. That was Jack's route to becoming a numery. Care for the poor, care for the oppressed, care for the immigrants.

loving your neighbor. These are things that were really secondary or tertiary or worse compared to sexuality. This moral order, it's not unique to Opus Day. A lot of Christians believe that if you mess with fundamentals like sex in the family, society crumbles. But Opus Day was the vision of one man, Escriber, who was a product of 1930s Spain. And Jack told me that Opus Day, that Opus Day's theological views are often in fact an expression of Escriber's social views,

and that some of them aren't authentically Catholic at all, like what Mary and Grace were told about their futures. You shouldn't have a career because if you're not trying to get married and have kids as young as possible, then that's a sin. And Opus Day's application of a sin to these things that the church says are not sins was surprising. They told stories all the time about how they knew people who got engaged and the women were like, well, you're going to help me take care of the kids, right? And you're going to help me in the house.

And the fiancé would then walk away and leave them and be like, I don't want a woman like that. So Escriver had views he wanted to share. And he also had a plan for how to disseminate them. Not through clerics like him, but through ordinary members of Opus Day. You've heard about the schools, youth clubs and summer camps they run. They're called apostolets, like the apostles who spread the word of God. Dan was someone who ran an apostolate,

and he told me how this collective mission is coordinated. He joined us in Numery in 2002, the same year that the church declared a scriver, a saint. Dan went to Rome for the canonization, where the crowd spilled out of St. Peter's Square and into the streets. By the way, in the US, Opus Day is often called The Work. We went to the catacombs. We visited St. Peter's. We went and saw a lot of the art. And then you had so many people from the work that you would bump into people. So it was almost magical in a way.

Dan spent two decades in Opus Day. That's not his real name, by the way. He was attracted to Opus Day's intellectual rigor, the doctrine and philosophy classes. For years, Dan ran the kind of formation classes that. that Catherine had attended. But he ran these classes for boys to help them achieve professional and personal excellence. Things like fatherhood, things like organization or finance, there's an etiquette class where it's like, you know,

when you're in a nice setting at a nice meal, you know how to present yourself there and don't just act like his lab. He'd been asked to take on the job by his seniors in Opus Day. It was a push from New York, meaning the commission, you know, the whole head of Opus Day in the United States. Opus Day's leadership isn't exactly transparent about its relationship to these apostolets

because it doesn't own these youth programs. They're owned and run by members, set up as non-profits with no legal ties to Opus Day. The group says its oversight is limited to spiritual direction, but it often overreaches that. They would send all the materials, all the same notes, all the same PowerPoint. and things, and it's set up as something independent, but there's still the back channels, so to speak. And those were not back channels that Dan could ignore. Everybody was told to get in line and do this program.

I would do it, but it wasn't anything I was passionate about. Dan tried to do his best, but he wasn't close with his colleagues. And frankly, he found his situation tough. It was finding cyclical repetitions of loneliness and isolation, where I would try to address things, they would get better for a time and then I would get lonely again. And this just kept happening. But then the latest one, I had made a friendship online, met this man. We did not have sex or anything like that, but we had started getting romantic affections for each other. And I felt very conflicted, given my situation, and I had entered a period of depression on account of that

where it was noticeable at the center. And I felt like I had to open up about it. Each week, Dan had a one-on-one with his spiritual director. Dan was supposed to tell him everything, particularly anything about faith, purity, or his vocation. So he did. And I was like, I need help here. Like, I'm just, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do.

Dan's spiritual director was kind. But then, a few months later, Dan had a conversation with the head of Opus Day in the Midwest. And in that conversation, the vicar told Dan that his work with minors had to stop because of what he'd confided. He had said because I had same-sex attraction and because of their policy with protecting children,

their policy was that I could no longer deal with minors. So I was forbidden to do any activities with minors after that, and that hurt very much. Basically, it hurt to be considered a pedophile or a risk for being a pedophile. This wasn't just anyone talking to Dan, conflating homosexuality with Peter Phil. not a rogue individual with extreme views.

He's a member of Opus Day's government. A year later, he became the head of Opus Day in the U.S. Today, he's third in command globally. And the help that Dan had originally asked for? It never came. I wasn't trying to live promiscuously. I wasn't trying to live outside of what the church dictates. And I never received any help.

We never talked about it again. And I didn't feel safe really bringing it up again because of how it been talked about. Dan said this was one of many areas where he felt Opus Day strayed outside of the church's teachings. There's a gay man on the Pope's advisory group for the protection of minors. In short, while the church believes gay sex is a sin, it does not conflate homosexuality with paedophilia. Dan had been assigned to work at the youth club by Opus Day's leadership in New York, and he'd had it pulled away from him just as quickly. He struggled for years with depression, but it took him a long time to question Opus Day's views, because he felt that challenging

their spiritual authority was akin to challenging God. I dreaded the thought of leaving. St. Maria had been quoted to have said, I would not give two pennies for the salvation of the son or daughter of mine who left their vocation. And those are pretty powerful things to say, especially to people who are trying to take their faith seriously. When I was speaking to Dan, there was something else, he said about his time in Opus Day, his time running these youth apostolutes, that made me stop and interrupt him. I did not approach this as a recruiting mechanism, even though I think the work saw it that way. Sorry, why do you say that you think the work saw it as a recruiting opportunity?

Because they talk about it, like we would create these statistics of how. how many times are you seeing young guys? And these kids that we would get to know, though, the work was really hoping that some of them would eventually come to having a vocation. That's why I see it as a recruiting measure. Like, we would be keeping the statistics that, like, you know, are we reaching people? Are we seeing people regularly?

What can we do to see them more? Are we making sure that, you know, we're keeping friendship with them? The Catholic Church is sometimes called the Universal Church. The Greek root of the word Catholic, literally means all-embracing. But Dan told me that Opus Day's strategy for expansion often distorts that idea, too. The work has been pretty open about wanting to find intellectuals

and good professionals and people who work hard because the work realizes, like, these people are influential and they're capable also of being given demands, right, which you're going to be given when you're in the work. In other words, Opus Day's Church is an elite, one. Jack also encountered this in a boys program he ran for several years until 2020. He was really good at it. That's the thing when people are offering their work to God. They tend to do it well. But Jack began to realize that while Opa's Day did want to expand the boys' horizons, there were

competing agendas at play. This program was for low-income urban youth in a major city in the United States. And during the summer is when we would bring in these college boys from around the country to come and live at the program and work at the program to provide one-on-one mentoring. And it was a decision about who those mentors should be that brought things to a head for Jack. There was a Hispanic young man who had been through the program and really valued the mentorship that he had received. So he wanted to be a mentor that summer. And I, felt that because of his lived experience, being a low-income youth from the city, having been through the program, being Hispanic like most of our boys in the program, he was more qualified

to mentor these boys than any of the college men from the nice suburbs. But when Jack tried to sign him up, a director in Opus Day's regional government intervened. A director in Opus Day told me, well, that's not a good idea. And I was like, why? He said, Because essentially this young man is not Opus Day material. He doesn't have the conditions to whistle. Remember, whistling was the term Escriver used to describe the first step of joining Opus Day, like kettles on the boil. So when they said he doesn't have the conditions to whistle,

what they meant was he's not the right candidate for Opus Day. About 20% of Americans are Catholics, and their education and income levels closely mirror the U.S. population. as a whole. I've spoken to nearly 100 current and former Opus Day members. This may be anecdotal, but except for the Assistant Numeries, the women who do the domestic work at the centres, hardly any of the people I spoke to came from what they would describe as working class backgrounds. There just is this strange, elite, and very white quality to Opus Day. At his youth program, Jack tried to push back.

I said to him, you well, I'm the one who was. works here. This is my job. And I think this young man is perfectly qualified. So what if I accept him? And I do remember this word for word. The director said to me, then we won't help you. And that was a threat. This director had no official role at the youth program. Like Dan, Jack was meant to be running it independently. But Jack was told that if he didn't listen, then they wouldn't help him find other mentors from Opus Day's network, mentors that he needed. to keep the program running. It was like scales falling from my eyes

because it was making clear to me something that had never really been spoken before that there was a power dynamic and a kind of singular focus on recruiting to the exclusion of anything else such as quality programming. I want you to know why I believe Jack and Dan and not just because they themselves are credible.

It's because I've heard similar accounts of a highly coordinated recruitment strategy from dozens of different people. At one point, I suddenly realized that almost every single person I'd spoken to who joined Opus Day as a celibate member had been introduced to the organisation as a child. From my perspective now, it was very manipulative. They told me to do a spiritual direction for the girls, to just bring them to have them to...

to say yes to their location. And it was like with 14-year-old girls that looked up to me like I was their big sister and they thought it was very cool. And of course, they do what I tell them. Opus Day members would typically work in professions, medical, legal, financial, political, and would therefore bring the virtues and the values of Christianity

into society. I'm quoting the founder himself. every son or daughter of mine should bring in every year three to four people should be whistling every year because of you. So that pressure, if the people are not, you should ask yourself because it means you're not wholly enough, you're not trained enough. The playbook is too similar, too repetitive, to believe these are just one-offs.

It seems institutional. Here's Dan again. There's the pressure to spread and there's the pressure, like, we want to be able to start more schools, We want to be able to help transform society in a good way, instilling virtue and people with family values and a love for God. And people want the formation. So we need centers to do that. To do a center, you have to have people.

To have a numerary, have the flexibility to go anywhere, well, they pretty much have to be college educated at that point. It's easier to move cities if you have that level of education. In other words, the reason why so many of Opus Day's members are drawn to the reason why so many of Opus Day's members are, drawn from the top tiers of society, is because Opus Day thinks that these people are more effective. More on that in the next episode, where we'll hear how Opus Day is bringing its worldview to America's universities, without anyone realizing. I thought, well, that seems significant that a think tank would be founded here at Princeton by someone who was until he arrived at Princeton. one of the national directors of Opus Day.

Every single person who worked there was both Catholic and involved in Opus Day. Opus Day is a worldwide fraternity or sorority, depending on which side you're on. It's definitely an over-representation that are involved with the political sphere. That's next time on Untold. Despite my repeated attempts, Opus Day did not want to contribute to this podcast. In the past, the group has told me that it rejects the claim that it's a little bit of and says its positions are only that of the Catholic Church. But it has acknowledged some failings and says it's working to improve its practices.

If you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch at antonia.cundi at ft.com. The reporting for this series was by me, Antonia Cundi and Persis Love. Written by me, Josh Gabbitt-Doyant and Persis Love. It was produced by Josh Gabbott-Doyon. and Persis Love. Original music, sound design and mixing by Breen Turner. Script editing by Matt Vela.

Fat-checking was by Simon Greaves. Our executive producer is Tofa Foreheads, and the FT's head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Nigel Hansen, Madison Marriage, Kadam Shibber, Helen Worrell, Miles Johnson, Marine Saint and Paul Murphy. Thank you to the many sources who shared their stories with us for this series. And thanks for listening.