I immediately perked up and, staring at her, said, "I used to belong to Opus Dei." The look she gave me was the equivalent of a hush falling over a room.
Thanks to "Code," Opus Dei is now an infamous name to my friend and to millions of others. According to Brown, the once obscure, mostly lay religious organization is a sinister cadre of Scary White Men (many of the group's members are, indeed, successful professionals) bent on preserving a 1,700-year-old cover-up sustained by the Vatican. Adding to the weirdness quotient in Brown's telling is the celibate membership's practice of ritual self-flagellation.
Others have charged that Opus Dei relies on narcotics and brainwashing to lure prospective members; some who have left the group said they were forced to sever ties with family and friends who questioned the group's practices. More ominously, Opus Dei's founder, the Spanish priest Father Josemaria Escriva, was seen by some as a closet Fascist who was linked to the regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
I never progressed beyond its outermost ring and am no expert on Opus Dei, but I seriously doubt the reports of sleep deprivation sessions in stone dungeons; I'm positive no one ever slipped peyote in my Pepsi. What got to me was a more powerful drug: the lure of being part of the elite, of being, well, a Scary White Man in training. When I finally left the group a few years later, it wasn't because I was asked to execute an enemy but because I simply started to grow up. And I began to wonder if they needed to grow up too.
I first encountered the group back in the early 1980s. Not far from where I grew up in northern New Jersey was an Opus Dei center that recruited eighth-grade boys from area Catholic schools, including mine. They offered classes and activities meant to appeal to college-bound, bookish kids like me, stuff like rocketry and trips to museums. As I began to participate in these Saturday afternoon sessions--sprinkled with small dollops of religious instruction--it seemed to me I was being sized up by the men who ran them and that, perhaps, I was making the grade. It felt like I was applying to the Ivy League.
That had a tremendous appeal to me. Somewhere along the way, I had decided I would lead a life of rigorous quality, become someone extraordinary. But I had no idea how to get there. I grew up in a blue-collar town, the kind of place where people changed their own oil and lived in homes packed so tightly that you could almost touch two of them at once with your outstretched arms. Everyone around me was plain as bread--or so it seemed to my 13-year-old, maladjusted self.
The people I met in Opus Dei, however, were cut from different cloth. The chapter I was affiliated with was home to about six laymen who took vows similar to Holy Orders yet kept one foot firmly in the secular world. They were scientists, Wall Street types, journalists for nationally prominent publications--the kind of people I knew existed only because I'd read of them.
Moreover, they seemed comfortable with their status and power in a way that I had never experienced before. To me, being rich meant that everything you bought was neon-bright or Cadillac-big, paid for in cash so new the ink was still wet. Opus Dei, however, taught me that money could murmur as well as shout.
