Opus Dei

Spiritual Damages

Unlike other religious approaches, Opus Dei had the attractiveness of waking up the desire for religion. I am not saying it was exclusive of Opus Dei. But without a doubt, for so many people Opus Dei meant the moving from the duty of observing religious practice –the routine attendance at the weekly Mass– to the desire for transforming the entire existence into a plentiful religious life.

This shift from duty to desire explains the impulse and institutional growth that Opus Dei had in its first decades, because this desire turned into effective sacrifice and this sacrifice into energy and fuel to set in motion an enterprise that could demand a total human dedication, a lot of whole lives at its service.

But along with the stimulation of desire came the opposite, the stimulation of anguish. The founder of Opus Dei Escrivá used to resort to the idea of death, of eternal damnation and, finally, of personal annihilation. Strange as it may seem, both impulses lived dialectically together in Opus Dei, one stimulated by the idea of reward and the other by the idea of punishment.

Over time, this desire would end up in frustration, both because of the vocational deception and because of the abuses suffered on the occasion of the own personal sacrifice made with the aim of giving oneself to God and transforming one’s own existence into a unity of everyday life and religious life.

In the end, the “Opus Dei experience” would end up badly -in too many cases-, after having awakened this desire and allowed oneself to pass from the dark age of duty –because God is love, not duty– to the luminous age of desire, everything would end up in darkness. This was probably because of the Opus Dei founder’s desire consisting in using the sacrifice of others to build their own organization, and to do so, to awaken the desire of others to sacrifice themselves. That is why the demand for a personal holocaust: to fulfill an insatiable desire, that consumes like fire and leaves only ashes. That is why the vocational deception. That is why everything.