Opus Dei elite do ‘God’s work’ as their slaves serve supper

WHILE the revelations of exploitation and slavery in Opus Dei are shocking, they are hardly surprising. In fact, it would have been even more noteworthy if the Catholic organisation that operates under a veil of secrecy had renounced the snobbery and misogyny that still pervades the Church, replacing it with Pope Francis’s mission to create ‘a poor Church for the poor’.

Recruiting teenage girls from poor families under cover of giving them an education to become skivvies or assistant numeraries, as they were called in Opus Dei houses, is despicable but it’s not without precedent.

The odious practice has echoes in the way nuns were often exploited as domestic drudges for cardinals, bishops and parishes, with no financial compensation to their religious congregations or formal labour arrangements. And all justified on the basis of freely giving oneself for others, a concept which, funnily enough, usually flowed in one direction.

Eileen Johnson a former numerary, raised another double standard. She described how she slept every night on the floor as a form of self-mortification, something men did only once a week because, she understood, women were more sensuous than men. Oh wanton female temptress, scourge of innocent man – the bedrock of the Church’s idealisation of virginity and the exclusion of women from power.

Opus Dei says that the vast majority of its members benefit from belonging. They must be the supernumeraries, the lay people recruited exclusively from the professional elites who live in mainstream society.

Opus Dei gives them the opportunity to pray and do God’s work among like-minded people. Presumably the opportunity to hobnob with people of higher status, blind to the handmaidens who serve their supper, is also part of the attraction.