Opus

Where Offshore Finance and Neo-Traditionalism Meet (Book Review)

I am a lapsed Catholic. The only time in many years that I’ve been to church, aside from baptisms and weddings, was on my recent DC trip. It was very nice—the priest’s homily was delightfully esoteric, linking supernatural phenomena (knocks on walls, disappearing objects etc) to the pleadings of souls in purgatory for intercessions by prayer—but it’s all very difficult for me to relate to. I would like to be a believer, but while I certainly don’t consider myself an atheist nor an agnostic, I’m plagued by a fundamental sense of doubt that hampers me from truly engaging with it on the deep, soulful level that it requires.

Still, I’m attracted to theology—Hans Urs Von Balthasar is one of my Catholic thinkers, mostly due to the fairly strange position that he heldwithin the turbulent traditions of the Church. It’s hard to describe. On the one hand, he could never said to be a modernist, but on the other he was fiercely critical of various neo-traditionalist elements that seek to roll back the hands of the clock in pursuit of an earlier, idyllic age of Catholic existence.

Maybe one could say that von Balthasar, to use an old and tired Marxist cliche, positions himself within and against modernity, that he lodges himself deep within the crisis, and hopes to restore some sort of sense of providential action within the tumult of historical movement (see, for example, his small book A Theology of History, which I recently reread and maybe will blurb about on here towards the end of the month). He was certainly inclined towards Catholic mysticism—he lent an afterward to the wonderful book Meditations on the Tarot—but simultaneously rejected the strategy of Quietism and departure from the world and its sense of progress, something one finds so often in mystical circles.

Among the particular traditionalist currents of which von Balthasar was critical included integralism, something that had a bit of a heyday back around 2018-2020. Another target was the Opus Dei, a worldwide Catholic organization formed in Spain in the late 1920s by theologian Josemaría Escrivá. Despite being officially recognized by the Vatican, I don’t think it would be unjustified at all to label it a cult operating within the Church—and a vastly influential one at that. Down through the decades the wealth of the organization, the sheer number of members populating its rosters, and the political influence it is capable of leveraging has steadily grown. This remarkable evolution had occurred despite a number of controversies: members of the organization have been known to practice corporal mortification, there have been cases of sexual abuse, and there has been a documented history of what amounts to human trafficking

Opus Dei is the subject of a book I read over the weekend—Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. What makes Opus so intriguing to me is that Gore is first and foremost a finance journalist. That’s where the book begins: he had been working on the collapse of Banco Popular, Spain’s fifth largest bank, which failed in June of 2017 after the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that the institution was careening towards breakdown. At the time, Banco Popular has some $100 billion in outstanding loans; with the ECB announcement, a run began on the bank, and its stock price collapsed over night.

On June 7, an announcement was made that Banco Popular was being purchased by Banco Santander. That is Spain’s largest bank, and the nineteenth largest bank in the world.

The opening pages move through this story quite quickly. Gore’s research revealed that the largest shareholder in the bank was a group known as The Syndicate, which was something of an elusive old boy’s network that dated back to the 1940s. But untangling the Syndicate was akin, in Gore’s words, to opening a series of Russian dolls, each mystery unveiling another, leading deeper into a murky world of shell companies and strange front entities. The Syndicate itself was comprised of an interlacing web of generically-named companies, and at the center of this web was the European Union of Investors—a company that was controlled, in turn, by the Opus Dei.

Opus Dei was utilizing Banco Popular as both a cash machine and a money laundering platform: they transformed the institution into the hub for a vast and opaque monetary network that allowed the organization to move money in secret around the world and to finance their activities. Monies moved through and pilfered from the bank’s balance sheets were put to work in their sweeping recruitment drives,\ and to increase their political influence. Ultimately, Banco Popular was sacrificed for these goals.

This is, unfortunately, a story not uncommon to the tangled world of Vatican finances. The Vatican’s bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), is known to have made ample use of the offshore financial world, quietly shifting funds back and forth from secret Swiss bank accounts through dummy companies and paper in the Caribbean and elsewhere. It was also the single largest shareholder in Banco Ambrosiano, the infamous Italian bank that collapsed in 1982. This was one of the truly great conduits for dark money: Banco Ambrosiano worked closely with BCCI, helped finance the Contras in Nicaragua, underwrote the sale of Exocet missiles to Argentina, laundered funds for Turkish and Bulgarian heroin traffickers, put CIA money into the hands of anti-communist trade unions in Poland, and, of course, did God-knows-what with vast sums of Vatican money.

Making matters even stranger was the fact that Banco Ambrosiano was under the control of the Propaganda Due, the Masonic lodge that appears to have played a not-insignificant role in Operation Gladio. Gladio was NATO’s clandestine ‘stay-behind’ apparatus that functioned behind the scenes in Italy, and it carried out the violent strategy of tension during the 1970s (bombings, shootings, all that good stuff in pursuit of a psyop strategy known as “political intoxication”). These events are the plot of the much-maligned Godfather Part III, though Francis Ford Coppola seemed recalcitrant to really come out and say exactly what he was doing.

A bit of a side-story: during the height of the Cold War, Belgium—the most sinister nation on the planet, surpassing even the United Kingdom—had its own Gladio-esque stay-behind network that engaged in actions even more horrifying and violent than those that took place in Italy. Part of social/psychological destabilization program a number of attacks dubbed the ‘Brabrant killings’ (named for the Belgian province where they occurred, between the years of 1982 and 1985). This string of violent events that left nearly thirty individuals dead and the identities of the majority of the attackers remains unknown to this day.

In 1986, a pair of officers from the BOB/Gendarmerie (Belgium’s equivalent of the FBI) wrote a report on their investigation into the Brabant killings and a wider pattern of infiltration of the country’s security forces by far-right/neo-Nazi/fascist individuals and groups. The subject at the center of the report? Opus Dei. The report also featured a truly bizarre diagram of people, organizations, and institutions that they had linked together, a sort of psychogeographical diagram of the most shadow-shrouded dimensions of the Cold War machinery grinding away in Europe. Here’s a piece of that schematic:

Up towards the top left you can see Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. The investigators then linked in Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, and then drew a line from him to Cardinal Marcinkus—the head of the IOR, the Vatican’s bank and the dominant shareholder in Banco Ambrosiano. The latter appears in this same diagram fragment, towards the bottom left.

Gore unfortunately opts not to pursue this tangle of leads, though he does comment on the swirling rumors of connections between Opus Dei and the death of Roberto Calvi, Banco Ambrosiano’s chairman (in June, 1982 his body was found hanging from a scaffolding between Blackfriar’s Bridge in London, overlooking the River Thames. His pockets had been stuffed with bricks).

This rumor mill was churning right as Pope John Paul II—the ‘media pope’—prepared to unveil the Apostolic constitution Ut Sit, a papal decree that would cement Opus Dei as a personal prelature—an official body within the Church itself. The decree finally went forward on November 28, 1982. What this meant is that the organization came to hold a pretty idiosyncratic position with the Catholic church. Through its general structures it is a lay organization, but following the prelature, it became an institutional part of the Church—it straddles both worlds, slipping between easily definable categories. Besides its heavy reliance on dark money flows and its sprawling membership (some 100,000 members worldwide), this is part of what produces the power of Opus Dei.

By the late 1980s, things were moving quickly:

Using assets syphoned from Banco Popular—and topped off with a portion of the bank’s profits earmarked for “good causes”—the Foundation for Social Action [an Opus Dei front] pumped millions of dollars into the expansion of Opus Dei in thirty-seven countries, including Argentina, Australia, France, Italy, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, and the UK. Two new high schools were built on the outskirts of Sydney, youth clubs were created in the Paris suburbs, university residences were constructed in newly liberated Poland, and cultural centers were established in Kinshasa, in what was then Zaire. While huge sums went into expanding the public face of Opus Dei—the schools, the youth club, and student residences designed to entice future numeraries into the movement—an equally sizable amount was pumped into supporting the hidden underbelly of the prelature: recruiting underprivileged girls as numerary assistants, who needed to cook and clean facilities in the sprawling network of new residences being planned by the prelate.

When it comes to the 1990s, Gore lands in Washington, DC, where Opus Dei built up a significant number of contacts within the media, the government bureaucracy, and the political class itself. Besides the two schools and three residents that the movement operated in the city, there’s the endless string of names of people who had been brought into the fold: Rick Santorum (the senator from Pennsylvania who lost the 2012 presidential primary to Mitt Romney), Larry Kudlow (he was the head of Trump’s National Economic Council and acts as a talking head for finance shows), Deal Hudson (publisher of Catholic magazine Crisis), Father Arne Panula (close friend of Peter Thiel), Leonard Leo (of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization that churns out Supreme Court justices like ticker-tape), on and on.

There’s a lot in the book on this sort of contact-forging and influence peddling, but what Gore opts not to really touch on is the sorts of inroads Opus Dei and related groups have made into the foreign policy establishment/military-industrial complex. It’s widely reported that Erik Prince is tied into Opus Dei, and he’s the guy who founded Blackwater and all its various permutations like Xe, Academi, and finally, Constellis Holdings. This complex is, of course, one of the private mercenary appendages of the American war machine, working closely with the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA to conduct wars both overt and covert around the globe. He pals around with the likes of Simon Mann, the infamous, globe-trotting British mercenary who was a participant (along Mark Thatcher) in the failed 2004 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.

Today, Prince trots around talking about the dawning of a new age of war privateers, which is packaged as edgy and groundbreaking ‘dissident thought’. It’s patently absurd. The use of mercenaries to conduct wars in the service of imperial ambitions, as a means of circumventing political and bureaucratic roadblocks to these goals, was first honed by the British in the era of decolonialization—basically, a bunch of SAS veterans and wealthy backers got together to figure out how to ‘preserve the British empire’ despite a government at home that they regarded as hostile to these goals. This model was adopted whole-heartedly by the Americans, after Jimmy Carter cleaned out from the CIA the majority of the ‘covert action staff’—they basically all went private, into PMCs (private military corporations) and PICs (private intelligence corporations).

So when Prince goes on stage at an event hosted by IM-1776 to run his privateer line, it’s old hat, it’s the standard function of warfare in a fragmenting, complexified and fluid world. He’s also good friends with the guy that runs Sovereign House in New York, which tells you how close all this stuff lands.

The Prince/Opus Dei connection also opens onto a wider tableau, the sort of territory that Seymour Hersh explored back in his extremely controversial writings (in 2011 I believe?) about the Joint Special Operations Command. The top leadership, he argued, was under the sway of the Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta, the Catholic chivalric order that has also maintained significant influence in the CIA itself (recall that one nickname for the CIA has been Catholics In Action). Fun fact: there’s extensive testimony concerning the Knights of Malta buried deep in the thousands of pages transcripts generated during the Iran-Contra hearings. Many of those pages of testimony are redacted.

I don’t know what to make of it. The use of chivalric orders and secret societies, often of a religious nature, by the military and the intelligence services is well documented. There’s the Propaganda Due lodge in Italy, mentioned earlier, which overlapped heavily with groups like the Knights of Malta. There’s also the weird and forever-splintering genealogy of the Order of St. John, a sideways history that binds together top military-intelligence operations to the domestic paramilitary underground, with fingerprints that can be tracked from the JFK assassination to Iran-Contra to the Oklahoma City Bombing. The Order of St. John (which is actually quite a number of orders), incidentally, presents itself as being part of the wider Knights of Malta lineage. They claim to be descendants of the Russian branch of the Knights, but no such branch actually exists.

I guess my ultimate thoughts on Gore’s book are these: he opts mainly to focus on the role of Opus Dei within the American establishment mainly to focus on their influence in state administration and the so-called cultural war, and how these two sides are connected to one another. That’s an important task, certainly, but it seems to remain largely at superficial level, gliding about on the surface and circulating the real thing that has yet to have been pierced. The administration of the American state depend on two things: the fevered circulation of money—and its shadow counterpart, dark money—and the persistence of war, war that is not executed with particular goals, but as a permanent policing operation in all corners of the world. That requires money, usually of a darker variety, too.

Opus begins with the money, but ends somewhere else, and the war machine is neglected. To really tell that story would probably take a person way beyond the boundaries of straightforward journalism, and into a more murky and inverse world where nothing becomes clear, because it’s a world designed by its very nature to be invisible and ungraspable. But I’m also more interested in those things, so I’m probably biased. Worth reading nonetheless.