Saints and Schemers: Opus Dei and Its Paradoxes

Rating:
Summary: The forced truth
Review: If you want to be successfull, just attack those who are at the top. This is the phylosophy chosen by the author of this manipulatory book. If you look for truth better choose something else, perhaps Vittorio Messori's book on the same subject. If yopu want to understand, to have a clear view, and then decide and may be judge Opus Dei, better forget the lies and uncorrect thesis that this book try to present as truth. One's perception is strongly distorted by one's own beliefs: this is the comment that any reader of the hugly book can make. The author just want to prove is personal vision of Opus Dei and he just look for everything that can prove his own position. This is how this book has been built.

Rating:
Summary: A Cult by any other name...
Review: Opus Dei is a destructive insidious opportunistic cult which needs to be exposed for the incredible damage it does. This book is helpful towards that end. Unlike the previous reviewer who has "heard" "visited" or "seen"... I have lived Opus Dei. As a former member, I can say with authority that Opus Dei is a malignant cancer on Catholicism. I am pleased that the truth is coming out, as evidenced by this book and others.

Rating:
Summary: opus dei is a chameleon organization
Review: Read carefully between the lines. Joan Estruch describes very well how Opus Dei is a "chameleon organization"--one among the major sources of its paradoxical regime.

By John Martin, "Leopards in the Temple," The Remnant Newspaper, June 30, 2002:

Grover and Mary Corcoran of Waterford, Virginia know at first hand what a trial it can be to have a voting-age daughter married to a true-believer Opus Dei supernumerary. What seemed to them at first a benign and trustworthy organization took on a different aspect as time passed and connubiality gave way to calamity.

"Our son-in-law," Corcoran writes, "would spend his vacation time at an Opus Dei workshop instead of with his family. Opus Dei also had him attending other spiritual sessions with them a minimum of three times a week. The rest of the time he only had recruitment on his mind. In fact, the only guests invited to his home for dinner were potential recruits.

"Opus Dei seemed to feel perfectly comfortable with the power they had over our son-in-law, and our daughter was constantly pressured to submit to Opus Dei spiritual direction. This became particularly oppressive when she needed hip replacement surgery and was insisting on Natural Family Planning. At the time she could barely walk, let alone cope or carry another pregnancy. [She had already borne two children.] According to Opus Dei, the ordinary teaching Magisterium of the Church, which approves Natural Family Planning, wasn't good enough.

"There were many other intrusions on the marriage....Finally, when our daughter asked her husband if he wanted to save the marriage by leaving Opus Dei, he said, 'Do you want me to leave the Catholic Church?' Members seem unable to differentiate between Opus Dei and the Church." In any case, Corcoran's son-in-law chose not to: "The marriage was annulled on the grounds of Lack of Due Discretion."

...In a letter to New Oxford Review, Corcoran said something that Opus Dei's supporters and apologists would do well to ponder: "Opus Dei is not a conservative organization, it is a chameleon organization. Opus Dei people are conservative when they are among conservatives, but liberal when among liberals--whatever serves Opus Dei's purpose of garnering influence, favorable publicity, money and power."

Rating:
Summary: secular, balanced, illuminating
Review: The purpose of Joan Estruch in writing this book is to describe Opus Dei accurately in its development as a religious organization, especially in the context of the recent history of Spain. In the scholarly search for truth, the author adopts an interpretative framework that is historical-sociological. Historical, because it derives from historical documents. Sociological, because it treats a social group as an object of study.

Since Estruch's approach is secular, he is free from the religious ideology that characterizes accounts for and against this controversial Roman Catholic organization. He thereby achieves a remarkable balance. In this respect, the book is unique.

His method is dialectical. First, it is to consider the pro-Opus Dei account of historical facts, the "official version." Second, it is to bring in the "non-official version," including the anti-Opus Dei literature. Third, it is to evaluate all the evidence. He uses several metaphors to describe this process, in particular, Father Brown, the detective protagonist of G. K. Chesterton's novels, who tries to construct a coherent picture despite important pieces missing from a large, complex puzzle.

The fruit of this approach is the author's conclusion that "the entire history of Opus Dei seems to be a succession of paradoxes" (p. 260). Hence, the title.

It would seem that the fundamental paradox is also suggested by the title, that Opus Dei is populated by people who are both "saints and schemers." Sanctity, of which honesty and forthrightness are constitutive, is supposedly incompatible with scheming, which in the case of Opus Dei means the use of deceit and trickery to advance the ends of the organization. Estruch locates the origin of this paradigm shift, the "sanctification of scheming," in Bl. Josemaria Escriva's experience of curial politics in the Vatican in 1946.

But the author contends the more essential paradox of Opus Dei is that it is both "reactionary" and "innovative." It is reactionary in fiercely adhering to Roman Catholic doctrine as elaborated by the Pope and his agents in the curia. It is innovative in being highly adaptive to modernity in economics, politics, the mass media, and cognate areas.

This paradox, the author believes, explains the singular compatibility between Opus Dei's brand of Roman Catholicism and capitalism. A similar relationship between religion and society was originally explored by Max Weber in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and it is this parallel that originally led Estruch to undertake this book.

Yet to me, the core paradox of Opus Dei is what the author describes in page 19, that the history of Opus Dei according to its apologists denies any type of internal evolution, "to the point of pure reification." Estruch convincingly presents overwhelming evidence that Opus Dei is not divinely born in perfection but is rather a creature of time and place, and moreover, that it evolves and continues to change. It is this paradox that accounts in part for the claim of "slander" on the side of Opus Dei when its self-image is incompatible with its critics' reports of historical facts.

It is this aspect of delusion--this denial of truth--that possibly captures the problematic kernel of Opus Dei. Indeed, Estruch suggests that it derives from Bl. Escriva when he says of the founder: "He was sincere in the sense that he was the first to believe whatever he said and whatever he did; he was the first to believe his own propaganda" (p. 68).

Thus the book is outstanding in that it illumines institutional paradoxes.

But the book is illuminating in other important respects. It creates a plausible portrait of the all-too-human Bl. Escriva; it links Opus Dei spirituality to the religious character of Spanish society and culture; it shows that the rivalry between the Jesuits and Opus Dei arises from turf encroachment and historical slights. And more.

While the academic style of Estruch asks the reader to plow through at times rather involved writing, the book is nonetheless rich in insight, a mine for the intellectually curious.

I have already opined that by taking the standpoint of the social scientist, Estruch generates notable credibility. In objectivity and quality of interpretation, the book is better than Robert Hutchinson, Their Kingdom Come (1997).

However, the author's scientific approach does not tackle Opus Dei in terms of its religious ideology, which represents the very raison d'etre of the organization.

Therefore, while Estruch makes a quantum contribution to understanding, he provides little, perhaps even very little, in the way of critique. This weakness is significant because it would appear that it is the ethics of Opus Dei that is on trial in the press.

Good book. Five stars.