Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 23, 1998 by Arthur Jones

Priests were being shot in the street. The bishop had already been in jail for 17 days. The cathedral was looted by men in red bandannas who traveled with harlots dressed in overalls and the riffraff from big city jails. The main altar, dragged out in the street, was stripped of its silver; the enormous baptismal font was thrown into the river.

Those held in the jail were being executed in batches. An agitator known as "the Undertaker" would hand a guard a piece of paper marked "good for 20," and 20 men at random would be selected, sent out and shot.

Now the bandanna wearers had the bishop captive.

"Don't be afraid," they told him. "If you've prayed well, you'll go to heaven."

He ignored their questions. They kicked him, then castrated him. He told them, "I'll pray for you in heaven."

A guard said, "Here, take Communion," and hit him in the mouth with a brick.

The bishop was lined up with the others and shot. Not quite dead, he was thrown onto the pile of corpses. It was not until more than an hour later a guard pulled a trigger and freed his soul.

Meanwhile, a little priest, Jose Maria, who hadn't worn clerical garb since the civil war began, was escaping by quick-witted deception -- traveling at night and eventually taking refuge in the Honduran legation. He lived for five months with five other people in an 8-by-10 foot room with a single window.

The furtive Jose Maria was 36, had been ordained at 23 and early on had conceived in the sketchiest form the idea of a religious organization that would have its own identity within the Catholic church.

The priest had discovered this possibility of a prelatura nullius -- bishops who had no diocese yet their own priests and congregation -- in the floor stones of the Abbey of Santa Isabel in Madrid, Spain. The abbey's status, which continued into the 19th century, was a leftover, the vestigial remains of an era when popes obliged kings and emperors and their kin with special favors.

For the rest of his life, Fr. Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer wanted the prelatura nullius revived and applied to his own organization. It would take another half-century. He would need money. He would succeed, despite three popes in a row -- Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI -- who said no.

The ransacked city was Barbastro, Jose Maria's home town. Its coat of arms was a severed Muslim head surrounded by five shields under the crown of Aragon, a Catholic Spanish royal house.

All the foregoing information is from a tale of considerable sweep. Weaving these happenings together in his mammoth 1997 book on Opus Dei, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, Robert Hutchison gives us a complex and convoluted account. Published in London, it is not an easy read.

"I first heard of Opus Dei in the 1960s," writes Hutchison, a Canadian financial journalist who resides in Switzerland, "when a Swiss banker friend informed me it was one of the major players in the Eurodollar market. A religious organization speculating in overnight francs and next week's dollars? That did not sound right at all."

Hutchison, well-known to British newspaper readers, kept watch.

The result is this highly detailed account of a driven, haunted and, in the author's hands, rather vainglorious little man who -- through converting dedicated individuals to his cause, through financial shenanigans and organizational dexterity -- led Opus Dei to jubilant arrival at the right hand of Catholic power.

Here, as detailed as we've yet read, is the story of Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer, from his father's failed business, the family's humiliation and slide down the lower middle-class social scale and the personal spiritual quest.

We read of the quest's roots in myth -- and its early boost from Spanish fascism's money; of the secretive, speculating financial network that Hutchison, a financial journalist, dubs "Octopus Dei"; of Escriva's facility for ingratiation with useful high church officials; of paranoia -- a food taster sampled every meal in front of him; and of simple snobbery, secrecy and deception. These are the warp of Hutchison's tapestry.

The woof is something alien to the modern, Western -- especially American -- mind.

Many Europeans (French and Spanish Catholics in particular) are fixated on a romantic and chivalric past (an ancien regime) when the pope crowned kings and arbitrated justice, mercy and goodness, and single-handedly attempted to create the Kingdom of God on earth.

This is the woof, this longing for and acceptance of a particular social order (as captured in the old Anglican hymn: "Rich man in his castle, poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate").

Order. Social strata. Each in his place. Control. Discipline. Obedience. Unquestioning obedience -- as in fealty, as in chivalry. As in crusades.

Franco used it. Escriva used it.

Escriva himself, while pitying such vanity in others as "puffs of pride," dug up a longdead, family-related noble title and appended `de Balaguer' to his name. Hutchison describes how Escriva -- in this and other matters, such as his doctorate -- padded his resume all the way to his beatification in 1992, with which Hutchison opens the book.