As I wrote in this column last December 26, there are large segments of the Philippine population who will have little interest in reading Allen’s book, either because they have not yet heard of Opus Dei or are so familiar with its apostolic activities that they don’t understand why a few individuals find it controversial. But there will be readers of my column who have read The Da Vinci Code or have heard about the myths that Allen exposes in his book.

In an article that appeared last December 16, 2005 in the National Catholic Reporter, Allen answers a few of the questions most frequently asked by media people and ordinary readers in various parts of the world about his book. I would like to share some of his answers with the readers of my column.

Are you a member of Opus Dei?

No, and neither is anyone in my family, nor do I have any financial or professional relationship with Opus Dei. This is not an "authorized" study. Further, my experience of travelling to eight countries and logging more than 300 hours of interviews convinced me that I’m unsuited for membership in Opus Dei, in the sense that I’m too insistent about control over my own time and space to feel comfortable for very long with the degree of structure that comes with membership. I therefore came at this book as an outsider, though one trying to understand Opus Dei, as much as possible, on its own terms.

What was your biggest surprise?

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s famous quip, how little "there" is really there. To judge by Opus Dei’s public image, one would think it’s a mammoth social force with great wealth and power. Yet even by the standards of the Catholic church, Opus Dei is a relatively small group, only modestly influential, with a profile similar to many other lay associations or even mid-sized.

To take the basic numbers, Opus Dei has a worldwide membership of 85,000, which is roughly equivalent to the Diocese of Hobart on the island of Tasmania off the Australian coast. The group also counts some 164,000 "cooperators," meaning "supporters." (The majority of both groups is women). Outside Spain, where Opus Dei was born in 1928, Opus Dei represents a tiny, almost invisible, fraction of the Catholic community; in the United States, for example, there are roughly 3,000 members out of a total Catholic population of 67 million.

Opus Dei’s global wealth — meaning the physical value of all the assets listed as "corporate works" of Opus Dei — is around .8 billion. For one frame of comparison, General Motors in 2003 reported assets of 5 billion. Even by Catholic standards, Opus Dei’s wealth is not terribly impressive; in 2003, the Archdiocese of Chicago reported assets of .5 billion. The American lay organization the Knights of Columbus runs an insurance program which all by itself is worth billion.

In terms of power, Opus Dei numbers only 40 out of more than 4,500 Catholic bishops worldwide, including only two members of the College of Cardinals, and just 20 out of more than 2,500 employees in the Roman Curia, including only one head of a policy-making agency. In truth, Opus Dei’s potential to "call the shots" inside Catholicism is far more limited than many imagine. For every Vatican battle Opus Dei members have won over the years, they’ve lost others.

Despite being a vaunted recruiting machine, Opus Dei’s growth rate is pretty small. Worldwide they add about 650 members a year, and in some places they’re basically stalled. In the United States, Opus Dei has hovered at about 3,000 members since the 1980s.

All this suggests that Opus Dei is not as imposing as some of the mythology would lead one to believe. Ironically, the people most determined to believe in Opus Dei’s occult power are generally not its members, but its critics, who see its modest structure as masking vast unseen influence.

Is it a secret society?

Not by conventional definitions of the term.

Unlike Skull and Bones, for example, Opus Dei’s existence is a public fact. You can find listings for their offices in the local phone book, and basic statistical data appears every year in the Vatican Annuario. Opus Dei runs a much-trafficked Web site, offering all kinds of information about the group’s history, spirituality, and works. The names of Opus Dei’s leaders are a matter of public record, as are the group’s statutes (at least in Latin).

Where do perceptions of secrecy come from?

First, Opus Dei leaves it up to members to decide whether to acknowledge their membership to others. For "supernumeraries," the seventy percent of members who are married, live in their own homes, and have normal secular jobs, this provision means that sometimes even friends and neighbors may sometimes be left to speculate about whether soand-so is "Opus Dei." It also means that whenever a prominent person is rumored to be a member, such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia or pundit Robert Novak, Opus Dei declines to comment, and so journalists are reduced to contacting these figures individually. (The answer in both cases, by the way, is "no").

Second, Opus Dei does not use recognizable Opus Dei vocabulary to identify its facilities or publications. For example, its student center at the University of Notre Dame is called "Windmoor," not the "Josemaria Escriva Center"; in Rome, its headquarters has the nondescript title of "Villa Tevere."

Third, Opus Dei resists spelling out certain aspects of its internal life, or reducing complex matters of its culture and spirit to the cold language of a policy or procedure. Thus when someone asks what exactly a member of Opus Dei does, or what the reality is about corporal mortification or finances (all perfectly legitimate questions), the usual answer is "come and see," or "get to know us." There’s no pamphlet to hand the curious spelling these matters out in black-and-white.

Seen from inside, none of this is about secrecy, but fidelity to St. Josemaria Escriva’s vision of a body of lay Catholics, indistinguishable in any external sense from their friends and colleagues, but on fire with the gospel. That’s not to say, however, that Opus Dei can’t do a better job of making itself transparent.

Let me add a personal note. For those who have known me since I—together with a handful of Filipinos and foreigners—started the apostolic activities of Opus Dei in the Philippines in 1964, there has never been any attempt on my part to hide my membership in Opus Dei from the people with whom I dealt in my family, professional and social life—whether they were the professors and students of De La Salle University where I taught from 1964-1970, at the University of the Philippines in 1967-1970 and at CRC and UA&P for the last thirty years. What I did not do, however, was to wear a sign announcing to the whole world that, despite my many human weaknesses and limitations, I have been struggling to be a saint by putting into practice St. Josemaria Escriva’s founding vision of the sanctification of work. Needless to say, calling the attention of everyone to one’s personal efforts towards holiness would have been the height of hubris. Those interested in getting a copy of Allen’s book on Opus Dei may get in touch with Totus Book Store, Tel. 7234326. For comments, my email address is _ HYPERLINK mailto:bvillegas@uap.edu.ph bvillegas@uap.edu.ph_.