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WORK TITLE: Opus
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PERSONAL
Male.
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CAREER
Editor and financial journalist. Host of The Syndicate podcast.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and the International Financing Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Gareth Gore is an editor and financial journalist. He has reported on a range of topics since the early 2000s and worked on stories from more than twenty-five countries. On financial-related topics, Gore has contributed articles to Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and the International Financing Review. He hosts The Syndicate podcast, which discusses the intricate behind-the-scenes aspects of history’s most significant financial deals.
Gore published Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church in 2024. The book looks into the sudden collapse of Spain’s Banco Popular in 2017. Through a series of interviews, Gore discovered that the conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei arranged for former chairman Javier Valls-Taberne to be ousted, which allowed for the organization to siphon millions of euros from the bank for its own projects around the world. The group was responsible for founding schools and institutes to push its extreme conservative agenda. Gore expanded his research into the group’s reach into the United States, linking it with several conservative elites in the country. It was responsible for funding the March to Save America in early 2021 and advocating for the judicial overturning of Roe v. Wade by using dark money channels. Gore found the group’s unethical practices extended into poorer countries, where young girls were forced into religious-bound slavery.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor insisted that “this well-documented book” moves “with the suspenseful twists and turns of a political thriller.” The same reviewer called Opus “unsettling, informative reading.” Writing in Washington Post Book World, Colin Dickey stated; “Eschewing the fabulism of [Dan] Brown … Gore nonetheless argues that in ‘a world obsessed with conspiracy theories—of QAnon and Bilderberg,’ Opus Dei emerges as a ‘real-life story of abuse, manipulation, and greed cloaked in the mantle of holiness.’” Dickey concluded that Gore’s “tone can itself range toward the conspiratorial, and he doesn’t always connect all of the dots in the way the introduction suggests. But in a well-documented and substantiated history covering almost a century, his central point comes through: that Opus Dei’s true mission, judged by its actions, has very little to do with holiness and everything to do with the enrichment and self-aggrandizement of Escrivá and the leaders who have followed.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2024, review of Opus.
Washington Post Book World, October 23, 2024, Colin Dickey, review of Opus.
Gareth Gore is a financial journalist and editor with close to two decades of experience, who had reported from over twenty-five countries and covered some of the biggest financial stories. His writing has been published by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and International Financing Review. He is the host of The Syndicate, which tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the biggest financial deals in history.
The Catholic organization Opus Dei was born amid conspiracy theories. Its founder, Josemaría Escrivá, had struggled to win converts to his group - envisioned as a lay entity within the Catholic Church that would inspire holiness among ordinary citizens in their everyday lives - from its founding in 1928 until the eruption of violence that became the Spanish Civil War. He was convinced that the Republicans were secretly controlled by a cabal of Jews, Freemasons and communists, all bent on undermining the Nationalists and the Catholic Church. After the king of Spain abdicated and the republic was proclaimed, Escrivá wrote, âGod confound the enemies of our Mother the Church!,â warning that even when things seemed calm, âthe Freemasons are not sleeping.â Only once he could convince potential recruits that a violent battle between good and evil was at hand, with the fate of the Catholic Church in the balance, did his organization start to find its footing.
Perhaps it's fitting, then, that almost 100 years on, Opus Dei has become a group itself associated with conspiracy theories. Millions were introduced to it through Dan Brown's phenomenally successful thriller âThe Da Vinci Code,â in which Opus Dei features as a shadowy organization of evil priests bent on keeping the church's deepest-held secrets from coming to light. Now, financial reporter Gareth Gore's nonfiction history, âOpus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church,â offers a sober, fact-based indictment of the organization, arguing that it represents a formidable and far-reaching threat to the modern world. Gore's book is a well-told, gripping story, offering a succinct and damning account of a sprawling organization whose actions have been often entirely at odds with its stated mission.
Gore's book offers the âpreviously untold storyâ of how Opus Dei took over a major bank in Spain as part of a complicated strategy to fund unprecedented growth, âtargeting children and vulnerable teenagersâ for recruitment and âcreating a beachhead in the world of U.S. politics.â Eschewing the fabulism of Brown - there are no Da Vinci Code-style assassins with albinism to murder museum curators here - Gore nonetheless argues that in âa world obsessed with conspiracy theories - of QAnon and Bilderberg,â Opus Dei emerges as a âreal-life story of abuse, manipulation, and greed cloaked in the mantle of holiness.â
Gore traces Opus Dei from its founding by Escrivá during the Spanish revolution through its rise to global prominence, casting its founder as a narcissist devoted less to doctrine than to ensuring his own place in history. The idea for Opus Dei came to him, he claimed, as a divinely revealed mission, but evidently, as Gore notes, âthe word of God was malleableâ: In the beginning, he strictly forbade women from joining Opus Dei; when recruitment was slow, he quickly changed his mind. Escrivá grew the organization through deception, using tactics akin to Scientology's: welcoming students in to study basic subjects like design and architecture, only to separate them from their families and slowly condition them to a cultlike existence in which they would pledge all of their wages and inheritance to Opus Dei.
When those personal donations turned out not to be enough to fuel Escrivá's ambitions, Opus Dei turned to fraud and money laundering. Building off ties to Spain's fascist leader, Francisco Franco, Opus Dei members gained control of the Spanish National Research Council in the late 1940s: Soon, one of every 16 grants awarded by the council went to an Opus Dei member. Meanwhile, a member who became a principal contractor for the Ministry of Education later confessed that his superiors had told him to inflate his budgets and pass along the skimmed cash to Opus Dei. In 1955, they began a takeover of the Spanish financial institution Banco Popular, targeting shareholders who were financially precarious and buying out their stakes through shell companies. Within a year, they'd replaced the bank's chairman, as control âpassed from an experienced group of well-known men with long, storied histories in the banking world to a group of unknowns.â As Gore alleges, the growth of Opus Dei and the glory of its founder were all that mattered; members âwere encouraged [to] do whatever was necessary to further the work of God - even if it involved abusing their positions at work, betraying their friends and family, or acting against their own conscience.â
Through it all, Opus Dei sought the protection of powerful men. Not long after Franco's death in 1975 (the same year Escrivá died), it was a new pope, John Paul II, who provided the organization with a legitimacy it had long been denied. The pope's conservative bent aligned with Opus Dei's mission to combat modernity on all fronts, and he repeatedly intervened to grant the organization special status, over the objections of his own cardinals.
With great power comes a great desire to evade responsibility: Throughout âOpus,â Gore details major indiscretions, many of them criminal, allegedly committed by individual members of Opus Dei. There is the Opus Dei priest who heard confession from spy Robert Hanssen and advised him not to turn himself in, but to donate to charity (meaning, of course, to Opus Dei) all the money he'd received from the Russians. There is Father C. John McCloskey, the pugnacious American spokesperson for Opus Dei who converted numerous high-powered Washington figures to the movement before himself being undone by a sexual misconduct scandal.
Most damning, though, is the degree to which Opus Dei recruited young women into a life of indentured servitude. Lower-class women, in particular, were lured with the promise that they would be trained to work in the hospitality industry, before being shuttled around to various Opus Dei sites, forced to sign their wages over to the organization while working interminable hours as servants. This practice has been alleged to have been part of Opus Dei since nearly its formation, but it wasn't until 2021 that a group of more than 40 women in Buenos Aires, all of whom had been recruited into Opus Dei, lodged a complaint with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith claiming they'd been used as indentured servants, which led to a formal accusation of human trafficking by Argentine prosecutors late last month.
These practices are beyond the pale, but your feeling about much of the rest of the work Gore details in âOpusâ will depend on your own faith. Opus Dei's influence on the Supreme Court (according to Gore, the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo, who was heavily involved in selecting Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominations, sits on the board of Opus Dei's Catholic Information Center in D.C.) is either an asset or a calamity, depending on your politics. Gore clearly is in the latter camp. His tone can itself range toward the conspiratorial, and he doesn't always connect all of the dots in the way the introduction suggests. But in a well-documented and substantiated history covering almost a century, his central point comes through: that Opus Dei's true mission, judged by its actions, has very little to do with holiness and everything to do with the enrichment and self-aggrandizement of Escrivá and the leaders who have followed.
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Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including âUnder the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracyâ and âThe Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained.â
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Opus
The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church
By Gareth Gore
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Dickey, Colin. "A history of Opus Dei â and the conspiracy theories around it." Washington Post, 23 Oct. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813362673/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9d949e8e. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
Gore, Gareth OPUS Simon & Schuster (NonFiction None) $30.99 10, 8 ISBN: 9781668016145
Investigation of a failed Spanish bank reveals unsavory ties to a secretive religious organization determined to "take back control" of a world tainted by secularism.
The 2017 collapse of the Banco Popular took the world--and financial journalist Gore--by surprise. The many shareholder interviews he conducted after moving to Madrid eventually led him to one of two brothers who had served as bank chairmen. From Javier Valls-Taberne, Gore learned that Opus Dei, an influential conservative Catholic sect, had controlled his older brother and dismissed Javier while bilking Banco Popular of millions, which the sect used to promote itself and its "works" around the globe. Gore's investigations revealed that beneath the mask of extreme ascetic piety Opus Dei presented--to individuals, communities, and even John Paul II, the pope who elevated the group to a personal prelature--were power-hungry men who worked to create schools and other organizations all over the world meant to "educate" rising generations in extreme religious conservatism. Digging deeper, Gore learned that Opus Dei had ties to American conservative elites that had funded the Jan. 6, 2021, "March to Save America" through "dark money vehicles" and helped bring downRoe v. Wade. Other unethical practices included recruiting young girls from poor countries, then using religion to force them into serving without pay all-male Opus Dei elites. Moving with the suspenseful twists and turns of a political thriller, this well-documented book reveals the hidden agendas and intrigue that belie institutional structures in a post-truth world.
Unsettling, informative reading.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Gore, Gareth: OPUS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A806452852/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=298e6de2. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.