About the Opus Dei. Sounds familiar?
http://www.mond.at/opus.dei/opus.dei.uo.faq.html#bad
The Unofficial Opus Dei FAQ
v0.24
This document is copyrighted by Franz Schaefer except for the definition of Fascism (which is from Chip Berlet). Permission to copy this document verbatim for any purpose is hereby granted. The latest version of this document can be found at: http://www.mond.at/opus.dei. Please forgive me any grammatical mistakes or misspellings, as English is not my mother tongue. (But I am always happy if someone tells me where I have made mistakes.) Also note that this is ``Work in progress'' and I am still adding material and changing things where I found that I was not accurate enough. The next thing planned is a chapter about the ``late'' Escriva to see if he learned from his faults when he grew older. Credits: Dr. Thomas Wilson for language screening and numerous people for sending me their opinions about my pages. En Español: http://opusdei.port5.com/faqs.htm
1. Q: What is Opus Dei?
A: Opus Dei a fundamentalistic sect which operates in a Catholic environment. Officially it is part of the Catholic church and so they claim that they are not a sect. Well, it all depends on how you define the word ``sect''. It would be best for you to derive your own opinion by reading this FAQ.
2. Q: Why have I written this FAQ:
A: A friend of mine got sucked into this cult and I had to explain to her why it is a bad thing. When I was searching on the Internet for information I found very little. There is their official home page "http://www.OpusDei.org/", which does not reveal much about their true nature. Since I also want to prevent other people from falling into Opus Dei's traps I have written this document. I once was a religious person and a Catholic myself, though I have always been an extremly critical person and did not accept all the positions of the Church. In my opinion, the Catholic Church has accumulated a lot of dust that covers the message of Jesus. Opus Dei is an organisation that adds to this dust and mistakes the dust for the message in a lot of ways. Where one could argue that the original ideas from Jesus made some sense it is already rather questionable what the Catholic Church makes out of it. Even more questionable is the dangerous ideology that the Opus Dei spread in their name. But since the Opus Dei is successfull in taking over the Catholic Church there is less and less distinction between them every day.
3. Q: What kind of people are they?
A: Mostly good people. People with good hearts who love God and want to do good things and sacrifice themselves for the work of God. Only/mostly good people are attracted by them. These people are all a bit naive because they make one big mistake: They think that the Opus Dei can not be bad, because the people there are good people and they are all very religious. Therefore, they do not see all the evil ideology which is in the teachings of Josemaria Escriva (founder of Opus Dei). Most of these people are rather intelligent, as the Opus looks for intelligent people because they want to increase their influence on society this way and they can get more money from them. But intelligence does not always go along with a critical mind. Particularly when it comes to religious topics, many people refuse to use their intellect at all.
4. Q: Are you supposed to use our intellect on religious things?
A: Of course you are. Even though the fact that most religious teachings contain some irrationality most of the teachings are usually accessiblt to the rational mind. e.g: Think of Jesus, he always explained his ideas to his followers in the way of telling parables which he hoped that they would think about and understand. In fact jesus never tought any misterious or magical things at all. No dogmatic believes that someone has to follow without understanding them.
The Catholic Church has made many bloody mistakes in its history (crusades, burning of witches, the Spanish inquisition, etc ... , etc ... see http://spunky.paranoia.com/~wcs/victims.htm) ), so why should we assume it is perfect now? If we do not use our minds on religious things we might as well follow the sect that committed collective suicide with the California cult when the comet came close to earth because they thought there would be a starship to bring them to God. (Of Course, who knows: maybe they were right and Catholic people are wrong?)
Well, if you believe in God then you have to believe that God has given you our brain to use it and a conscience to decide right from wrong. In opposition to this the Opus Dei demands us to sacrifice our intellectuality to them and to completely trust their teachings as they claim these teachings are all God's will. Criticism is not wanted and not allowed. They will tell you that this only covers the religious field and that the members are otherwise completely free to do what they want. While I do believe that we should not completely trust humans in religious fields this is belittling. For a man who takes his religious beliefs seriously, almost any decision in life will be covered by his beliefs. So do not sacrifice your rational mind to any human organisation regardless of how holy they seem.
5. Q: What are the positive things in Opus Dei?
5.1 Q: What is the ``childhood in front of God'' about?
A: The idea of ``childhood in front of God'' has been nicely covered in the main book of the founder of Opus Dei (Josemaria Escriva: ``The Way''). Unfortunately, like every thing that is meant for God the Opus tries to utilise it for itself. So out of the ``childhood in front of God'' the ``childhood in front of the Opus'' is developed - so that their members do not act on their own responsibility, but leave every important question to the Opus, like children do with their parents.
5.2 Q: What about ``becoming a saint in every day life''?
A: I think every one here on earth should make this world a better place, so there can never be enough "saints". Making the world a better place can be done by charity and love. Unfortunately the Opus Dei view is that becoming a Saint is mostly a question of prayer; the topic of charity and love is of secondary importance to the love of God. (If Escriva, the founder of the Opus, had been a person with a little understanding of the Bible he would have known that there is no difference between these two types of love at all:
And the King will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.' Matthew 25.45
5.3 Q: What about the development of a deeper spirituality
A: This is also one of their good points. Keeping up a high level of spirituality in our modern world is not an easy task and they do have some good concepts of how to do this. Of course it depends on what is meant with spirituality. If spirituality means a "dedication to too good and useful things for humankind" then it would be a good thing. Here the problem starts with the Opus Dei ideology....
6. Q: What are the negative things in Opus Dei?
A: In short:
- The Fascist ideology in Escriva's teachings. The fundamentalism. The
- Intolerance towards other religions.
- The dishonesty.
- The danger inherent in the undemocratic structure of blindly following orders.
- The danger inherent in the psychological control they have of their members due to the ``weekly chat'' where they have to tell the innermost details of their souls to their spiritual leaders.
- The aggressive and manipulative way in which they try to catch new members.
- The evil character of the founder.
- The fact that they do not reveal their true goals and keep a lot of material secret from the public.
- The smug thinking of belonging to an elite
