He is obsessively loyal to his superiors, believes in the power of pain and commits murder for the glory of God. Silas, the hooded albino in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, is certainly one of the more bizarre figures of recent popular literature. Now the blockbuster novel's murderous monk is about to find new life on a blockbuster screen. Next month, Sony Pictures unwraps its long-awaited film version of Brown's endlessly popular bestseller. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, The Da Vinci Code opens worldwide on May 19. And with the shadowy Silas and his sinister superiors back in the spotlight, the Opus Dei controversy will get a whole new shot in the arm.
In Brown's thriller, Silas and some of the other 'bad guys' are identified as members of the real-life Roman Catholic organization, Opus Dei (Latin for "the work of God"), a crucial plot point. Even before his prologue, on a page he labels "Fact," Brown describes Opus Dei as "a deeply devout Catholic sect that has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of brainwashing, coercion and a dangerous practice known as 'corporal mortification.'" He points out, correctly, that the U.S. home of Opus Dei recently opened its $47-million national headquarters in New York City. Then he kicks off his story of mystery, murder and mayhem, with Opus Dei at the centre. Three pages into the narrative, as Silas ensures a victim's death will be slow and agonizing, he says, "Pain is good, monsieur." If you're one of the world's 87,000 devout conservative Catholics who belong to Opus Dei, that has to hurt.
Right? Isabelle St-Maurice just laughs. The Montreal-based director of Opus Dei's Canadian press office prefers to see The Da Vinci Code as a marketing tool. "It's free publicity," she says. "So many people have begun to ask questions and want to know about us, so we give them the information. We explain the reality of Opus Dei. It's a good opportunity. "That approach reflects Opus Dei's position internationally. The organization's website (www.opusdei.org), which had more than three million visitors last year, has just launched a renovated version that is modern, comprehensive and user-friendly. The sophisticated educational outreach even devotes a section to Brown's bestseller, in an effort to correct what it says are inaccuracies in both theology and the depiction of the organization. ("It would be irresponsible to form any opinion of Opus Dei based on The Da Vinci Code," it states flatly.) The website, which went online a decade ago, is available in specific national versions (including opusdei.ca) and 22 languages. Through it, the organization says, it receives thousands of e-mail queries. "Everything is open and on the website," notes St-Maurice, a member of Opus Dei for 36 years. The 51-year-old former music teacher is a "numerary," a member who lives in a special Opus Dei residence and practises celibacy and corporal self-punishment. Thirty per cent of the organization's members are either numeraries or "associates" (priests), while the remaining 70 per cent -- "supernumeraries" -- consists mostly of married people. There is also a layer of participants called "co-operators," who like the Opus Dei message and support it through prayer, participation in activities and financial contributions. But co-operators are not actual members of Opus Dei, and some of them are not even Catholic.
Supernumeraries, numeraries and associates share the organization's driving credo that each of life's activities, at work and at home, is an occasion for holiness and good works. That principle has been at the core of Opus Dei since it was founded in Spain by Josemaria Escriva in 1928. The conservative organization and its founder were close to the heart of the equally conservative Pope John Paul II. The late Pope oversaw the canonization of Escriva in 2002, 17 years after the Spanish priest's death. St-Maurice says there is nothing on the outside to distinguish a member of Opus Dei from anyone else. "But inside, there is a light. We just try to be closer to God in our daily lives. "When she was growing up in Valleyfield and Quebec City, St-Maurice says she was influenced but never coerced by her parents, who were Opus Dei supernumeraries. "They helped us to live our faith, but in freedom. "It sounds so sunny -- the devotion, the camaraderie, the essential goodness of the goal -- that the vitriol Opus Dei also generates seems puzzling. But there's no denying that, outside the loving circle of its adherents, Opus Dei does not gladden all hearts. In fact, it inspires emotional responses ranging from mixed and wary to outright hostile. Dianne DiNicola heads a Massachusetts-based international group called ODAN (Opus Dei Awareness Network) that has existed for more than 14 years to warn people about the organization. The group was founded by a number of families who, like DiNicola, had had life-altering negative experiences with Opus Dei. Many were parents who had seen sons and daughters become different people, increasingly estranged from their families. "All of us were practising Catholics, and we were so wounded by the organization. "Today ODAN, a registered non-profit organization staffed entirely by volunteers, operates a comprehensive website (www.odan.org) and acts as a conduit for the cautionary testimonials of thousands of former Opus Dei members and their families throughout North and South America, Europe and Australia. Two other organizations operating in Spanish and Portuguese have the same mission. Even within the clerical ranks of the Catholic Church (John Paul designated Opus Dei a "personal prelature" in 1982, which means it is answerable only to the Vatican), it is viewed by many with more than a little apprehension. The late Cardinal Basil Hume, for instance -- Archbishop of Westminster and head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales -- was openly critical of what he described as the group's unacceptable behaviour, particularly its infiltration of organizations. And liberal Catholics mistrust its aggressive and extreme ideological and religious conservatism. "Opus Dei does not see a dynamic relationship between faith and contemporary perspectives," says David Perrin, diplomatically. Perrin, an Oblate priest and professor in the faculty of theology at Ottawa's Saint Paul University, is one of those liberal Catholics. "God is calling us to love him," says St-Maurice simply, as if that were all you have to know about Opus Dei. But the taint of some associations, facts and images is difficult to erase. Although not a political man, Escriva did make comments interpreted as sympathetic to dictators such as Spain's Francisco Franco, who had several cabinet ministers belonging to Opus Dei. The organization's critics have accused it of cosiness with other suspect figures, such as dictators Antonio Salazar of Portugal and Juan Peron of Argentina. Opus Dei has defended itself against such charges by suggesting that the historical evidence for them is either misinterpreted or out of context. Even today, liberals are unhappy with the organization's possible influence in upper secular circles, such as the United States Supreme Court, where justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have been linked to it. Opus Dei's website says it "would like to dispel once and for all the rumours that (former FBI chief) Louis Freeh, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Mel Gibson are members." But critics maintain there are connections, even without membership. Freeh was said to have sent his son to an Opus Dei school, and Scalia's son is an Opus Dei priest. They don't have to be formal members of Opus Dei, observes DiNicola, to share their mindset. She points out that Cherie Blair, wife of the British prime minister, attended an Opus Dei event. "Opus Dei is very good at going to people of influence and promoting their own agenda. And sometimes these people don't even know they're doing Opus Dei's bidding. "That happens as well at the level of the "co-operators," she says, who are described as "supporters" of Opus Dei's work. "Define what 'support' means," she says. "You have to ask them very specific questions to get any real answers. I think Opus Dei uses the co-operators for its agenda, and they ask them for money. I talked with one man, a former co-operator, who told me he finally saw through it, and it just turned him off. "The organization has more unsavoury associations. Twenty-five years ago, when a scandal erupted involving the Vatican Bank -- complete with charges of money laundering and the suspicious death of bank chairman Roberto Calvi -- the Opus Dei name came up in possible affiliations with the principals.
More recently, there was the case of Robert Hanssen, likely filed deep in the organization's "Bad Apples" folder. Hanssen was an FBI agent sentenced in 2002 to life imprisonment for spying. For $1.4 million, plus diamonds, he had sold U.S. state secrets, including details of national security, to Russia. A vociferous conservative who told a friend that anyone who voted for Al Gore should be shot, Hanssen was also revealed during the investigation to be obsessed with pornography, going so far as to install a hidden camera in his bedroom to film himself and his wife having sex, and sharing the video with a friend.
Invariably described as "a devout Catholic," Hanssen was also a devout member of Opus Dei. One of the powerful Opus Dei characters who flits darkly through Brown's famous piece of fiction mentions Hanssen, referring to him as "the ultimate embarrassment."
Other facts are undeniable. Opus Dei is an ultra-conservative organization. It is wealthy and secretive. It is international, operating in more than 60 countries with more than 87,000 members, and it does wield influence at the highest Vatican levels. And a good number of its members do wear the cilice (a tight barbed chain) against their skin, take cold showers regularly and whip themselves with a nasty little corded device they call the Discipline.
By the popular standards of the modern world, that makes Opus Dei look pretty weird. But does it make them bad?
Ask Isabelle St-Maurice if Dan Brown got anything right about Opus Dei when he wrote The Da Vinci Code, and she thinks hard. "Well," she says slowly, "he spelled it right."
St-Maurice says she read the book strictly for its entertainment value. "You have fun reading it, because it's a thriller. But it's fiction. It's not something that sticks."
What she found disturbing was the fact that Brown's obvious research is so mixed up with his created material that people can confuse the fact and fiction far too easily. And she didn't much care for its theology.
Dianne DiNicola, 63, didn't much care for the theology, either. Still a practising Catholic, she was bothered by the questions the novel raised about the divinity of Jesus. But she found one thing in The Da Vinci Code absolutely spot-on.
"The blind obedience in Opus Dei -- that's true. In Opus Dei, there's no free will, really. They're proselytized and recruited aggressively and worked on."
DiNicola speaks from personal experience. Her daughter Tammy was a recruit.
Today, at 38, Tammy is the mother of three sons and a small-business owner with her husband. But as a fresh high-school graduate from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, away from home to attend Boston College, a respected Catholic university, she was essentially ripe for the picking.
Befriended by an Opus Dei member, she was eventually convinced to join the organization. She didn't tell her parents, because it was suggested to her that she should not.
"We began to see a personality change in Tammy," says her mother. "She had always been so happy-go-lucky, and now she was not. We had always communicated, and now she didn't. It was as if her life was being controlled."
DiNicola says Tammy's mail was being read, and she was coming home less and less, participating in fewer and fewer family activities. "It was as if she had died."
By now, DiNicola and her husband Carlo knew that Tammy had joined something called Opus Dei. Both active Catholics, they tried unsuccessfully to get help from their church. "But they didn't understand, and Opus Dei had a lot of influence anyway."
Eventually, they heard about "exit counselling" -- sessions designed to help people out of an organization they feel powerless to leave -- and convinced Tammy to go, a strategy that finally released her.
The DiNicolases had known nothing about Opus Dei before their youngest child went off to college, but learned a great deal about it in time and through bitter experience. They realized they were not alone when they came across another family who had experienced something similar. In 1991, the DiNicolases and a group of 50 other people -- mostly parents and former Opus Dei members -- formed ODAN. In the years since, they have been contacted by former members and their families from around the world, as well as priests, campus ministers and others who have had direct contact with Opus Dei. They were even cited in The Da Vinci Code.
The ODAN site is filled with information and often shattering testimonials about everything from perceived emotional manipulation and mind control, to habits of secrecy, to details of corporal self-mortification.
"We just wanted to tell the world about Opus Dei's questionable practices," says DiNicola. And so they have. If Opus Dei is being swamped with requests for information since the publication of Dan Brown's novel, so too is ODAN.
Among the most dramatic of those questionable practices -- certainly the one that gets the most ink -- is the personal corporal punishment. Opus Dei's official line these days is to downplay it, describing it as no more severe than a small denial of comfort.
"It should just be called a sacrifice, really," says St-Maurice, who admits to wearing the cilice. "It's just something that bothers." Numeraries, the nearly 30 per cent of the organization who have chosen a dedicated life of celibacy, are the Opus Dei members expected to practise the corporal mortification that includes cold showers, kissing the floor first thing in the morning, silences, fasting, the cilice and self-flagellation with the Discipline.
"When I first started watching them," says DiNicola, "they denied practising self-mortification. Now they say it exists, but it's up to the individual. And that is not true. We've been contacted by thousands of former members, and I've not heard one individual who's been in Opus Dei say that there was any free choice involved in self-mortification."
There is certainly no doubt that the practice was very much part of the spiritual life of their founder, who was said to have left his blood in streaks on the walls and floors after his self-flagellation. In his published memories of Escriva, Bishop Javier Echevarria, the current prelate of Opus Dei since 1994, describes the "severe corporal penances" willingly undertaken by the organization's saintly founder.
David Perrin of Saint Paul University points out that, abhorrent as it appears today, the practice was not unknown in the Roman Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council. That council, which opened in 1962, brought the fresh air of reform to the Church, including the suggestion that corporal self-punishment was no longer to be encouraged. Until that time, many congregations of priests, brothers and nuns had the practice on their books, even if they were no longer doing it.
But Perrin questions its purpose today. "What kind of holiness does it reflect? What kind of duality?" Since Vatican II, he says, there has been a greater appreciation of corporality and the idea that the integrated wholeness of a person -- body, mind, sexuality -- plays a role in the journey toward holiness. The ancient notion of dichotomy, that the material is bad and the spiritual good, stems from the Church's earliest days, he says. But it no longer fits.
"Two thousand years later, does it make any sense to separate those two things, which is what is suggested by this flagellation? Does corporal punishment make sense, or is the cosmology behind it defective? We in the broader, mainstream Roman Catholic Church today no longer find that acceptable or even helpful. We have a more holistic sense of ourselves."
Perrin says he can't even imagine where you'd find a cilice. "You could try Desmarais & Robitaille here in Ottawa for church supplies," he jokes, "but I suspect you won't find one."
DiNicola says she's heard that the cilices and Disciplines are specially made for Opus Dei by a convent of Spanish nuns.
There are also other things about Opus Dei that disturb mainstream Catholics. The organization has been criticized by less conservative elements for its rigidity. While many in today's Church are calling for openness, debate, reform and an acknowledgement that the Church must exist in the contemporary world even as its core values transcend it, Opus Dei's traditional inflexibility is viewed as a stumbling block to any kind of progress.
There is no question that the organization has members operating at the highest Vatican levels, suggesting ultra-conservative influences on policy. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, for instance -- director of the Vatican Press Office under John Paul II and re-appointed by the current Pope -- has been called the most visible representative of the Church in Rome after the Pope. Navarro-Valls has been a numerary of Opus Dei (that is, one of those who commit to celibacy and self-mortification) since the 1970s.
Perrin gives full credit to Opus Dei for its founding principle -- the notion that all individuals, both lay people and clerics, have the same access to holiness -- which he says was, in 1928, ahead of its time.
But he does take issue with other aspects of the organization. He wonders about its "personal prelature" status, which makes it exceptional and removes it from the authority of the local church. He finds its practice of leadership overly clerical, with power and influence in the hands of its priests, rather than the laity it was founded to empower. He thinks the role of women in Opus Dei is suspect. (The organization preaches equality, but is adamant about separate, and clearly defined, roles based on gender.) He questions its openness to dialogue with other religions. He is uncomfortable with the depth of Opus Dei's conservatism, which does not allow for the kind of discussion currently going on in the larger Church, where a number of traditional elements -- the role of women, for example -- are being debated and re-examined.
Nor does its obsessive secrecy serve it well, Perrin says. "Opus Dei does have well-defined initiation practices, and what those are tend to be kept on the quiet. When things aren't divulged, we fill them in with all kinds of information or fantasies."
He also acknowledges the charge made by some people that Opus Dei is power-hungry. "I really don't know. But they do tend to set themselves up close to prestigious universities -- and who goes to prestigious universities? The wealthy. Extrapolate that further, and you have people with influence and position and power. Obviously, if you can recruit those kinds of people, you're going to achieve that kind of presence in the world."
That presence is found in some surprising places, too. Ottawa's Justina McCaffrey, wedding-dress designer to the internationally rich and famous, has said that both she and her husband are Opus Dei members.
In fact, the aggressiveness of Opus Dei's recruiting has been the subject of strong criticism for some time. In a 1995 article on Opus Dei in America, a Catholic weekly magazine, Jesuit priest James Martin interviews Russell Roide, another Jesuit priest and the former director of campus ministry at Stanford University. After students flooded his office with complaints, Roide contacted Opus Dei and asked them to be less aggressive. When they weren't, he banned them from the campus. After that, he told Martin, they became "subtle and deceptive."
The official line from Opus Dei is that they are not aggressive and that "recruiting" only happens when people are willing. But as Martin notes in the same article, Escriva emphasized it. "In the internal magazine, Cronica, he wrote in 1971: 'This holy coercion is necessary, compelle intrare, the Lord tells us.' And, 'You must kill yourselves for proselytism.'"
The organization says it has 600 members in Canada and 3,000 in the U.S., but DiNicola questions the numbers.
"Twenty years ago, they were saying they had 3,000 members, and today they're still saying 3,000. I know a huge number of numeraries leave, but not the supernumeraries. These are families with kids. A lot of those kids are then recruited to become numeraries."
Whether or not they exist as proselytizing opportunities, there are numerous Opus Dei-run venues throughout Canada and the U.S. Apart from the Opus Dei centres, there are educational institutions, educational and social programs, student residences (including Parkhill and Valrideau in Ottawa, for men and women respectively), retreat houses, conference centres, summer camps and even some Catholic parishes and chaplaincies. Perrin frames the question of the day. "Is all of that scary for some people? I guess it is."
Scary or not, one thing is certain. The staggering popularity of The Da Vinci Code, as a bestselling book and soon as a box-office film, has shone an unprecedented spotlight on Opus Dei in ways the organization never envisioned. While the image has been the antithesis of flattering, Opus Dei seems to have adopted the time-honoured principle that has served so many spotlight subjects so well.
As long as they spell your name right.
Since the novel appeared in 2003, says St-Maurice, Opus Dei has been deluged with expressions of interest. Still, it's too early to say if that interest will translate into increased membership.
"It's a vocation," she says. "It goes slowly." The person who shows interest in Opus Dei must develop an understanding of the organization, the life commitment it requires and his or her suitability within that. It doesn't happen overnight.
Ask St-Maurice about the impact of The Da Vinci Code on membership, and she laughs.
"Maybe I will call you in three years."
In the meantime? "We say to Dan Brown, thank you very much."
Dianne DiNicola's view is darker. "Opus Dei had a horrible reputation way before The Da Vinci Code. Now they're putting on this big PR campaign. I think they're worried they're going to be found out."
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