I’ve discovered through reading a letter published in a newspaper (a serious letter by a serious person) that Dr Michael Asciak, the chairman of Malta’s Bioethics Committee, is a member of Opus Dei.Opus Dei is, to my mind at least, a frighteningly obsessive, intolerant and controlling ultra-conservative Catholic organisation.
When people tell me they belong to a prayer group, I am mildly amused.
When I find out – because they rarely tell you – that they belong to Opus Dei, alarm bells go off and I run a mile.
Now I wonder whether the fact that the chairman of the Bioethics Committee belongs to Opus Dei was not considered to be a significant piece of information when he was appointed.
And why wasn’t it ever discussed?
This is not a matter of his private life and private interests. It has a direct bearing on his views as chairman of the Bioethics Committee, which deals in matters about which the Vatican has very, very strong opinions.
The Bioethics Committee was convened to advise the government on matters like stem-cell research, in vitro fertilisation, artificial insemination, the freezing of embryos, sperm donor systems, and the legislation that should regulate all this, but doesn’t, leaving Malta as a sort of bioethics Wild West in which anyone can do anything (except abort a foetus or divorce, of course).
Appointing a member of Opus Dei as chairman of Malta’s Bioethics Committee is about as useful or as desirable as having that committee chaired by the archbishop. A member of Opus Dei, like the archbishop, is going to toe the party line, the party in question being the Vatican. This is 2007.
Malta is a secular democracy and a member State of the European Union. This may come as a surprise, but lots of people are very grown-up now, and despite being professed Catholics, they would have a lot more confidence in a secular bioethics committee than in one chaired by a member of Opus Dei.
People are increasingly uncomfortable with this country’s relentless failure to draw a distinction between the secular and the religious. They find it unacceptable in Islam, and it doesn’t take much intelligence or imagination to understand that, for precisely the same reasons, this sort of thing is unacceptable in Catholicism too.
If an Islamic Bioethics Committee were to be chaired by a mullah, we would laugh and pity the society in question for its backwardness and repression. Yet here we are, with a bioethics committee chaired by a member of Opus Dei. That makes it difficult for us to have faith in its findings as driven by secular concerns, rather than by the concerns of the Vatican.
* * *Opus Dei is not the Legion of Mary or the Society of Christian Doctrine. Its members deny this strenuously, but there is something a little sinister about it, even deeply creepy. It’s had a lot of bad press in recent years thanks to Dan Brown’s fiction, but let’s put it this way: it would have been very hard for Brown to write convincingly in the same way about the Legion of Mary.
There are reasons why that fiction struck a chord.
Opus Dei works through control and influence, seeking to infiltrate organisations that are useful in furthering its interests, these being the interests of ultra-conservative, even repressive, right-wing Catholicism. It seeks to exert influence in other ways, too, like befriending those who are usefully influential in themselves, and who can be used as conduits for messages. I have had lots of close encounters with emissaries of Opus Dei over the years because of this. The organisation systematically targets influential persons in the public eye, particularly journalists and newspaper columnists.
A series of pleasant young women was dispatched to befriend me over the years, a process with which I complied because I am always so curious about other people’s lives and the way they think.
This curiosity verges on morbid fascination when it comes to people who willingly abandon themselves to the control of scarily obsessive religious groups and actually seem to enjoy it. It is so far removed from my own mind-set (I still wake up with a sense of relief that I have escaped the clutches of school) that to me it is like meeting somebody from Mars.
These women would pop down to Malta every month, from Opus Dei’s headquarters in Parioli, the most salubrious (and expensive) address in Rome, to check on Opus Dei’s local constituents.
We’d go for a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning, and then spend the next hour having a conversation in which I tried to find the key to the mind of somebody who actually sits down and decides to have a bizarre life, when most of us do our best to avoid having a bizarre life foisted on us.
It all began when the receptionist at this newspaper’s office called me to say that a young woman had gone there several times asking for me, and when she wouldn’t give her my number, the young woman left a note asking me to call because she really wanted to speak to me “about an article I had written”.
I called back, and it was years before I got away.
A weaker person would not have stood a chance in hell, and would by now have been whipped up and minced by Opus Dei, perhaps even becoming the chairman of the genetic engineering committee or the advisory committee on divorce legislation.
I found it all very entertaining, because when Opus Dei targets people it matches the one doing the targeting to the targeted.
So they sent somebody I could relate to, rather than a plain-Jane Jesus freak in a pale blue fleece with one of those zips at the neck, polyester trousers, a gym-teacher haircut, running shoes, and no make-up, who would have sent me screaming for the hills.
It was after several monthly chats over coffee (“oh, I come to Malta to visit a friend”; I thought she was having an interesting secret liaison) that she let slip how actually, she’s with Opus Dei and actually, the reason she lives in Rome is because she was sent there for some years for “training”, and actually, the reason she doesn’t have a boyfriend, or a husband, or children, or a sex-life is because she’s not allowed to.
I had been getting a bit bored by then, as one does with people whom you suspect of not telling the truth about themselves and of putting up a false front, but now I got curious. The trouble is that she mistook my relentless questions as being motivated by a desire for a life of repression.
But there I was, trying my damnedest to learn more about the fine line between self-control and self-hatred, between love for God and distaste for human beings, between the need to belong to a group and the need to control others outside the group. There were revelatory moments in which her eyes would harden and her laughing expression would switch like a mask to hatred and contempt, when I mentioned certain freedoms we take for granted in the democratic, secular world outside Opus Dei.
And I thought: “This is what the mind of an inquisitor is like, concealed in the person of a seemingly well-adjusted and attractive young woman.”
It was quite off-putting, and a bit scary. I got the impression that she wouldn’t think twice about physically harming people or infringing their human rights in the name of God.
When she left Rome and went back home to serve the interests of her masters halfway across the world (I am hoping, for her sake, that she has since fallen in love, embraced life, and put a rocket under all that self-flagellation and demented self-control, and that she never wants to hear the words Opus Dei again), she left my name and number with her successor.
This successor was more in the Jesus freak vein, with clothes and hair to match, so relations were strained from the start. They went downhill completely when we began to talk about the murder in the United States of doctors who performed abortions, and attacks on abortion clinics; there was a spate of them in the news at the time.
To my horror and disbelief, she thought they were justified, and like her predecessor, her face changed into a mask of hatred when she talked about it. “If you knew that people were being killed in that clinic, wouldn’t you attack it? Wouldn’t you burn it down? Wouldn’t you damage the lock so that the killers couldn’t get in?” she said, in the unlikely surroundings of a staid Sliema café.
Well, no, I wouldn’t actually, no more than I would burn down a laboratory where animal experiments take place, even though I am fond of dogs. If people were being killed somewhere, I would call the police, not burn down the building or shoot the killer (and I’m beginning to be frightened of you, so I’m just going to pay this bill here and go home to the safety of my normal family, where nobody bashes bibles, tells you that Jesus loves you, or lets you know what God thinks when you don’t particularly care).
“But those people can’t call the police, because in the United States abortion is not considered to be killing people,” she said. “So they have to take the law into their own hands.” By now, my eyes were on stalks and I was groping for the escape button. I have no doubt that killing abortion doctors or burning down their clinics is not something that Opus Dei either advocates or condones. But this is the kind of person that an organisation like that invariably attracts: the sort who wants to control others as well as themselves.
Because they keep themselves on such a tight leash (and often hate it, so why do they do it?), they insist that others must do the same, failing which they will do it for them. Opus Dei is an intolerant organisation, and so it is a magnet for intolerant people. People who are like this truly cannot understand issues of democracy, of secularism, of freedom to be as one pleases, of the right not to espouse your chosen religion.
They believe that their views, because they are The Best and The Only True Ones, should be imposed, forcibly, on everyone else. They know that this is not permissible in today’s democratic world, but rather than being thankful for it, they regret it. I never saw that woman again. She called for months afterwards, but I always said I was busy, meeting a deadline, cooking lunch, taking a shower, just popping out for an abortion, washing my hands after performing an abortion, filing for divorce, swinging from the chandelier... she didn’t get the message.
Then she too left Rome and went back to live halfway across the world, in the kind of country where Jesus-freak clothes are the norm.
And I got a call from another woman, who told me that she had been given my name and number by – you guessed it. I was tempted to tell her that I was recovering from a triple abortion, and that I was resting to be fit for a spate of devil worship that evening, it being a full moon, but I didn’t want her to get too excited.
Then the calls would never stop and I might find an Opus Dei delegation on the doorstep.
Instead, I spoke the polite equivalent of “whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested”, and went back to chopping vegetables.
She called a couple of times after that, but then gave up.
For all I know, Opus Dei has found other columnists and Important People to prey on.
I, on the other hand, am clearly a very lost cause.
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