Spain: God’s Octopus

You want to be a martyr. I’ll place a martyrdom within your reach: to be an apostle and not call yourself an apostle, to be a missionary—with a mission—and not call yourself a missionary, to be a man of God and to seem a man of the world: to pass unnoticed.

—The Way

The Way is surely one of the world’s most extraordinary bestsellers. Written in 1933 by a Spanish priest named Jose-maria Escrivá, it consists of 999 aphorisms (sample: “Be firm! Be strong! Be a man! And then—be an angel!”) that come so close to Dale Carnegie’s exhortations that it might well be called How to Win Friends and Influence God. Yet The Way has sold more than 2,000,000 copies in 15 languages, including Tagalog and Swahili, and is now being translated into 15 other tongues. It is the only written credo of a rapidly expanding but widely misunderstood religious organization known as the Sacerdotal Society of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei.

Opus Dei, as it is commonly called, is a loosely knit organization of laymen and priests that Escrivá founded less than four decades ago in Madrid. Despite his counsel to “pass unnoticed,” it has become the most controversial —and in many ways the most powerful —Spanish ecclesiastical invention since the Jesuits. Many Spaniards call it “Octopus Dei,” and in Argentina it is widely believed to be a “holy mafia.” Many Jesuits, in particular, consider it heretical in both concept and practice—a sort of Catholic freemasonry. Spain’s Diplomat-Journalist Ismael Herráiz charges that Opus Dei already “controls the organisms that control Spanish economic policy and is in a hurry to appropriate the instruments of social policy.” In Spain, rival factions within the Franco regime as well as its illegal democratic opposition both consider Opus Dei the principal threat to their ambitions because of the large number of members in government.

Privy Council. Franco appears to have submitted practically all of Spain’s economy to the hands of Opus Dei. Development Planning Minister Laureano López Rodó, Minister of Commerce Faustino Garcia-Monco, Minister of Industry Gregorio López Bravo, Central Bank Governor Mariano Navarro Rubio and Ambassador to the Common Market Alberto Ullástres are all members. Spain’s sixth largest private bank (Banco Popular Espaňol) is owned almost solely by Opus Dei members, and they reportedly control 13 other banks and insurance companies, 16 real estate and construction firms and an industrial empire that includes five chemical plants.

Two Madrid newspapers are owned and edited by Opus Deites, and so are a dozen Spanish magazine and book-publishing houses and the nation’s leading independent news service. Three Opus Dei members sit on the privy council of Don Juan de Borbón y Battenberg, the pretender to the Spanish throne, and an Opus Dei priest serves as confessor to Prince Juan Carlos, who is next in line. Moreover, the country’s only private university, the Pamplona-based Universidad de Navarra, is an out-and-out Opus Dei institution, and Opus Dei professors are being hired with increasing frequency for chairs in state universities.

Natural Product. Opus Dei’s great and growing influence in Spanish life is no conspiracy or intrigue but the natural product of a unique organization whose members, drawn largely from the professions and the managerial class, were bound to rise to the top in any case. Its message is a sort of Catholic moral rearmament—an opportunity for serious and dedicated men to live Christian lives outside the cathedral as well as in it. Its founder, Escrivá, gave up a law career to join the priesthood. But instead of encouraging others to take up the habit, Escrivá began preaching that laymen who dedicate their work to God have as much chance as priests to achieve sanctity.

“Opus Dei,” he said in a rare interview with TIME’S Madrid bureau chief, Peter Forbath, “was born to tell men and women of every country and of every condition, race, language, milieu and state of life—single, married and priests—that they can love and serve God without giving up their ordinary work, their family or their normal social relations. My teaching has been that sanctity is not reserved for a privileged few. Every profession, every honest task can be divine.” In Spain, the membership of Opus Dei includes movie directors, jet pilots, labor leaders, high-fashion hairdressers and, as Escrivá proudly points out, even a barber in Seville.

Directed at Youth. Given official Vatican recognition in 1950 as the Church’s first “Secular Institute,” Opus Dei is no longer a purely Spanish organization. Its headquarters are in Rome, and it is now active in 68 countries, including the U.S.—where it has established residence halls and study centers (which teach such mundane subjects as oceanography) for students in 20 cities.

In Colombia, the two leading candidates to become the nation’s next President are both supporters of Opus Dei. In Britain, where Right-Wing Tory M.P. John Biggs-Davison is an Opus Dei proponent, the Queen Mother presided six months ago at the dedication of the organization’s London residence hall. Opus Dei members run a language school in Japan, teach Indians in the Peruvian Andes how to read, and founded Kenya’s first racially integrated high school and a secretarial school for African girls. Total worldwide membership of the organization now approaches 60,000, of which only 25,000 are in Spain.

In Spain, as elsewhere, most organized Opus Dei activity is directed principally toward youth. The organization operates more than 100 residences and study centers for students and young workers throughout the country. Its Universidad de Navarra, with twelve separate faculties and an enrollment of 5,220, is acknowledged to be Spain’s best university by far. Its graduate school of business administration, opened in Barcelona nine years ago in conjunction with Harvard, was the nation’s first institution to teach modern management techniques on a graduate level. It operates a trade school in a Madrid working-class district known as “Little Moscow,” a center for the ever-rebellious coal miners of Asturias, even maintains a “spiritual retreat” where bullfighters can escape at least the horns of the devil.

Chastity, Not Celibacy. Such are the demands that Opus Dei makes of its members that it takes a dedicated and devout youth indeed to join the fold. “Jesus is never satisfied sharing; he wants all,” warns Escrivá. Although less than 2% of its members are priests, all members are encouraged to take the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. As interpreted by Opus Dei, the vows for lay members are somewhat less strict than for priests. Whether or not they have taken the vows, members may own their own cars and homes and salt away enough money to protect themselves from financial ruin, but they are expected to turn over all “excess” income to the organization. They may marry and have children (“Chastity does not mean celibacy”), but they must remain faithful to the “spirit” of chastity. Single members, moreover, must agree to go anywhere that Opus Dei sends them, and all must follow the guidance of their religious counselor.

The organization makes no attempt to tell its members how to do their jobs, nor does it try to influence their political thoughts. “Opus Dei has nothing whatever to do with politics,” says President General Escrivá. “It is absolutely foreign to any political, economic, ideologic or cultural tendency or group. The only thing it demands of its members is that they lead a Christian life, trying to live up to the ideal of the Gospel.”

Although the presence of so many high-powered Opus Dei men in the Franco government has led to charges that the organization is pro-Franco, others of its members are in outspoken opposition to the regime. Spanish police last year arrested two Opus Dei professors of the Universidad de Navarra for putting up anti-Franco posters, and Opus Dei students joined a nationwide strike for greater campus freedom. Civil Law Professor Amadeo de Fuenmayor, an Opus Deite, risked his neck by going on record with a scathing attack on Franco’s much-publicized religious-liberty law, calling it inadequate outside “the context of freedom in general.” Within the government, Opus Dei Cabinet ministers, all of them brilliant young technocrats, have been directly responsible for the sweeping economic reforms that brought Spain out of isolation and into prosperity. They have also been among the prime movers of the Franco regime’s slow but unmistakable political liberalization.

Inevitable Suspicions. Most of the controversy surrounding the organization, in fact, stems from the very success in so many fields of its members, who are generally from the better-off, better-educated stratum of Spanish life. The Jesuits resent Opus Dei’s incursions into Spanish education, and old-fashioned businessmen blamed Opus Dei when they lost their clients to brash young Opus Dei competitors. With their air of enthusiastic self-righteousness, Opus Dei members often irritate both laity and clergy—particularly since in many areas they accomplish more than the church. With their insistence that secular life should be Christianized rather than Christianity secularized, they raise inevitable suspicions in some quarters that they favor a practical union of church and state.

As for Msgr. Escrivá, he insists that Opus Dei “never becomes involved in any temporal affair.” It is thus not surprising that he attributes the obvious success and power of the organization and its members to divine direction. Opus Dei was founded, he says, “without any human means. It was born small, but it grew little by little, like a living organism, as everything develops in history.” The organism he rules is nonetheless an extraordinary one. A measure of its power is that no bishop, archbishop or cardinal—let alone a mere politician—has any power over it. Msgr. Escrivá himself is responsible directly to the Pope, and to God.