Da Vinci Code: Opus Dei « Bishop Booyah’s Blog

Da Vinci Code: Opus Dei

With all the buzz about the Da Vinci Code, I thought I'd do some research into Opus Dei. It's actually a pretty interesting subject.

It was founded in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá and basically he was interested in helping Christians understand that their life was about holiness and to spread the gospel. Opus Dei means “God’s work”.

If you're a Da Vinci Code reader, I'm sure you're wondering: Do they really use that spiked chain thingy on their legs? Or do they really beat themselves bloody with that rope thingy?

Well, the answer appears to be: yes, sort of. They don't beat themselves bloody, but that's always a personal option. The purpose of these implements is to help the user to "mortify" their body.

This isn't just an Opus Dei thing. If you've ever given something up for Lent, or if you've ever given something up to be "closer" to God, then that's pretty much same idea. They mortify their body with the use of these implements, or by not taking cream and sugar with their coffee, or sleeping on the floor, or whatever is an inconvenience for the flesh – which supposedly gets them closer to God. Some people even go so far as to crucify themselves at Easter (they’re usually not members of Opus Dei but just normal Catholics).

Protestants also have this same sort of mentality, trying to do something, either painful or inconvenient in order to be more "holy".

Even non-Christians will do things like this. I remember reading a story about this Hindu holy man named Ludkan Baba who rolled on the ground for 1500 miles. He’s doing this to liberate his soul from the reincarnation cycle and to bring peace to the earth. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, but he seems to be enjoying himself.

So I guess we can't really bash on Opus Dei for doing weird things to their bodies. I mean Yoga seems to be a very weird thing to do to your body, but millions of people are doing it.

Where the problem lies, or at least it seems to me, is not with Opus Dei, or with the person who started it, but with any system of religion that teaches that works are a path to holiness.

In New Mexico, several years back, this one guy got drunk, got behind the wheel and ended up hitting a minivan killing a woman and her children. This guy got up in court and sobbed and put on quite an act even though the record showed that he already had something like 12 DUI’s.

Let’s say that it was your wife and your kids that were killed – how many “kind acts” would that man have to do in order to pay off his debt to you?

It doesn’t matter how many good works this man did from that point on, the fact remains that he is STILL guilty for murder. He can’t undo that.

If an infinite and holy God exists, then in order to be just He has to judge sin. And unless you’re perfect, you’re going to fall way way short.

But God is love right? I’m sure a lot of people know this, it’s found in 1 John 4:16. God is love and God is just, so how will He deal with us?

Well, God has to judge sin, but since God loved us so much (John 3:16), Jesus came to earth and was judged in our place.

Donald Barnhouse gives the example that man sinned, God poured out a little wrath, but He set up a dam of patience that held it back. Man sinned more and more, God’s wrath poured out more and more but His patience held it back. Throughout the ages, throughout the generations the wrath of God was stored up. Until one day, Jesus went to the cross and at that point the dam of God’s patience broke and poured out on Jesus.

Now, you can either accept Jesus substitution, or you can face God’s wrath for your sins.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to face God’s wrath. I know my own heart, I know what lies in there, I know my past, I know what I’ve seen and what I’ve thought – I don’t want God to open the book on my life and examine all my actions, all my thoughts, all my intentions. Nothing is hidden from God. Nobody can stand next to you and say “oh, he intended to do this or that…” not when God already knows your intents.

And indeed, scripture says in the book of Ephesians chapter 2 that it’s by grace you have been saved and not through works – so that you can’t boast.

I know, I know, we all want to feel like we’ve contributed to our salvation. But let’s say you went out and visited a porn site, how many good works would you have to do in order to pay for that? Let’s say that because you gave that website traffic that they were able to go out and exploit more girls and those exploited girls start traveling down a path which eventually leads to their death, or a drug riddled life. Now how much do you have to pay?

Hopefully you can see that your little sins could have a snow-ball type of effect and you really don’t know how many good works you need to do in order to pay for that sin. Our sins could have unintended consequences.

That’s the problem with a works based system, scripture says you cannot pay for the infinite gift of salvation from God by your finite life. Jesus came to give you eternal life, life that exists beyond this mortal body and that gift of infinite life cannot be paid for if you did 70 years worth of good works.

Paul the apostle wrote that all the scripture is given by God and is profitable for instruction in righteousness. If you want to know how to be holy, don’t beat yourself, read the scriptures, study them, learn what it means to be holy in the eyes of God.

To be “holy” basically means that you are “whole”. It’s the same concept. God is perfect, He’s complete, He’s whole, and He wants you to be whole too.

I know that I felt in the past that I wasn’t whole, that something was missing in my life. When I dedicated my life to Jesus, I knew I was at that point whole.

If you would like to know how to be whole, visit my entry: How to Know God

Now that we’ve got the interesting stuff over with (the barbed wire thingy and the knotted rope thingy), Opus Dei is really their own little sub-church within Catholicism. They’re what are called a “prelature”, which is like an independent church, but they’re still under the authority of the Vatican. So the Vatican has the authority to tell them what to do or not to do.

And indeed, most of the Opus Dei people not only submit to the Vatican, but support even the most controversial of doctrines like the birth control ban.

Opus Dei is not a group of mysterious ninja monks, but it’s made up primarily of lay persons. They have several different membership levels:

Numerary: Celibate and usually residents of Opus Dei houses; give salaries to Opus Dei; practice various forms of mortification, including use of the cilice (barbed wire thingy) and use of the discipline (knotted rope thingy).

Supernumerary: Can be married and live with their families.

Numerary priests: Join as lay members, but are chosen to become priests; some Vatican positions; each Opus Dei house has a numerary priest.

Associate members: Pledge celibacy but generally don’t live in Opus Dei houses; include people who don’t have university degrees or want to remain with their families.

Numerary assistants: Celibate women who take care of all Opus Dei residences.

Cooperators: Provide financial support, but aren’t considered members; don’t have to be Catholic.

Please note the lack of positions like “Righteous Senior Assassin” or “Most Holy Hit Man” or “Head of Department of Offers that Can’t Be Refused”.

Regarding finances, they have about the same finances as any church within Catholicism. They definitely didn’t bail the Vatican out of any financial difficulties.

Outside of these few things, there’s not much interesting about this group.

Oh, Mel Gibson is definitely not a member of Opus Dei.

For more research visit:

Official Website
Decoding Opus Dei by Edward Pentin
The Ways of Opus Dei by DAVID VAN BIEMA
Wiki: Opus Dei
Opus Dei lifts veil by JOHN CHADWICK
Opus Dei: Fact and Fiction

Opus Dei Awareness Network
is a group of people who are trying to expose abuses within Opus Dei. They have a lot of testimonies from exmembers.

May 23, 2006 - Posted by bishopbooyah | Apologetics, Da Vinci Code | | 3 Comments

3 Comments »

Bishop, you may want to check out a new website about Opus Dei…. http://www.opusdeiblogs.org and hear from both current and former members of The Work. Then please get a Catholic Bible and read St. James and the part that Luther took out that we are saved by “faith and good works”. I am a former Lutheran and now a Roman Catholic and member of Opus Dei. Please read the piece below by Peter Kreef…sorry it’s so long, but it’s important. Thanks much, Norm

Justification by Faith PETER KREEFT

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The Protestant Reformation began when a Catholic monk rediscovered a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book. The monk, of course, was Luther; the doctrine was justification by faith; and the book was the Bible. One of the tragic ironies of Christian history is that the deepest split in the history of the Church, and the one that has occasioned the most persecution, hatred, and bloody wars on both sides — this split between Protestant and Catholic originated in a misunderstanding. And to this day many Catholics and many Protestants still do not realize that fact.
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The Protestant Reformation began when a Catholic monk rediscovered a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book. The monk, of course, was Luther; the doctrine was justification by faith; and the book was the Bible. One of the tragic ironies of Christian history is that the deepest split in the history of the Church, and the one that has occasioned the most persecution, hatred, and bloody wars on both sides, from the Peasants’ War of Luther’s day through the Thirty Years’ War, which claimed a larger percentage of the population of many parts of central Europe than any other war in history, including the two world wars, to the present-day agony in Northern Ireland — this split between Protestant and Catholic originated in a misunderstanding. And to this day many Catholics and many Protestants still do not realize that fact.
Luther’s story is well known. Passionate, impetuous, demanding, sensitive, and pessimistic in temperament, Luther had never been able to find inner peace. He could not overcome his sense of guilt despite all his good works, prayers, penances, and alms. His confessor advised him to read Romans. No more historically momentous advice was ever given by a confessor. In Romans Luther discovered the simple bombshell truth that God had forgiven his sins freely, not because of Luther’s works in Germany but because of Christ’s work on Calvary. That discovery freed Luther’s spirit and ignited a fire that swept over Europe. The watchword of the Reformation became Saint Paul’s summary of the gospel: “The just (justified, saved) shall live [have eternal life] by faith [in Christ]” (Rom 1: 17)

Where then do good works come in? In Christian Liberty, Luther explains that after the great liberation about faith — that we are saved by faith in Christ’s work, not by our works — comes a great liberation about works: they need not be done slavishly, to buy our way into heaven, to pile up merits or Brownie points with God, but can be done freely and spontaneously and naturally, out of gratitude to God — not to get to heaven but because heaven has already gotten to us. Thus they can be done for the sake of our neighbor, not for our own sake, to purchase salvation. And this is winsome. No one wants to be loved as someone else’s good deed for the day.

The origin of the Reformation is often said to be Luther’s act of nailing ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences to the door of the church in Wittenberg. This event is celebrated as Reformation Day (October 31, 1517). Luther’s decision to go public was occasioned by the scandal of Tetzel, a Dominican monk who shamelessly peddled forgiveness of sins for a fee. He even had a singing commercial: “Sobald das Geld im Kasten klingt,/Die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt!” (“As soon as the money clinks in the casket, the soul springs free from the fires of purgatory!”) The story was told of the thief who asked Tetzel whether he could buy forgiveness for all his future sins as well as his past sins. Tetzel said yes, but it would cost him a thousand gold pieces. The thief paid the money, took the indulgence, and then stole back the money from Tetzel!

But the scandal of selling indulgences was only the catalyst, not the cause, of the Reformation. The Church soon cleaned up its act and forbade the sale of indulgences at the Council of Trent, agreeing with Luther on this point. But one does not split the Church over a practice; one splits the Church over a doctrine, for the Church can change its practice but never its doctrine. To change a practice, one stays in the Church; to change a doctrine, one must start a new Church.

Luther eventually came to reject many Catholic doctrines that he thought he could not find in Scripture. But only one justified his bold words before the Diet of Worms, which condemned him: “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.” The doctrine was justification by faith. The justification of Luther’s faith, he thought, was the doctrine of justification by faith.

For everything is at stake here. The question is nothing less than how to get to heaven. Luther thought the Catholic Church was teaching not only heresy (heretics always call orthodoxy heresy, by the way) but another religion, another way of salvation, “another gospel” (Gal 1:6). That’s about as serious a charge as you can imagine. We need to examine this charge very carefully to justify the surprising claim that the fundamental dispute between Protestants and Catholics was due to a misunderstanding.

It certainly doesn’t look like a misunderstanding. It looks like a flat-out contradiction: the Catholic Church taught that we are saved by faith and good works, while Luther taught that we are saved by faith alone (sola fide). But appearances may be deceiving.

For one thing, even if the two sides did disagree about the relationship between faith and works, they both agreed (1) that faith is absolutely necessary for salvation and (2) that we are absolutely commanded by God to do good works. Both these two points are unmistakably clear in Scripture.

For another thing, the terms of the dispute are ambiguous or used in two different senses. When terms are ambiguous, the two sides may really disagree when they seem to agree because they agree only on the word, not the concept. Or the two sides may really agree when they seem to disagree because they agree on the concept but not the word. The latter holds true here.

When Luther taught that we are saved by faith alone, he meant by salvation only the initial step, justification, being put right with God. But when Trent said we are saved by good works as well as faith, they meant by salvation the whole process by which God brings us to our eternal destiny and that process includes repentance, faith, hope, and charity, the works of love.

The word faith was also used in two different senses. Luther used it in the broad sense of the person’s acceptance of God’s offer of salvation. It included repentance, faith, hope, and charity. This is the sense Saint Paul uses in Romans. But in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul uses it in a more specific sense, as just one of the three theological virtues, with hope and charity added to it. In this narrower sense faith alone is not sufficient for salvation, for hope and charity must be present also. That is the sense used by the old Baltimore Catechism too: faith is “an act of the intellect, prompted by the will, by which we believe what has been revealed on the grounds of the authority of God, who revealed it”.

This “faith”, though prompted by the will, is an act of the intellect. Though necessary for salvation, it is not sufficient. Even the devils have this faith, as Saint James writes: “Do you believe that there is only one God? Good! The demons also believe — and tremble with fear” (James 2: 19). That is why James says, “it is by his actions that a person is put right with God, and not by his faith alone” (James 2:24). Luther, however, called James’ epistle “an epistle of straw”. He did not understand James’ point (applied to Abraham’s faith): “Can’t you see? His faith and his action worked together; his faith was made perfect through his actions” (James 2:2 2).

Faith is the root, the necessary beginning. Hope is the stem, the energy that makes the plant grow. Love is the fruit, the flower, the visible product, the bottom line. The plant of our new life in Christ is one; the life of God comes into us by faith, through us by hope, and out of us by the works of love. That is clearly the biblical view, and when Protestants and Catholics who know and believe the Bible discuss the issue sincerely, it is amazing how quickly and easily they come to understand and agree with each other on this, the fundamental divisive issue. Try it some time with your Protestant friend.

But many Catholics to this day have not learned the Catholic and biblical doctrine. They think we are saved by good intentions or being nice or sincere or trying a little harder or doing a sufficient number of good deeds. Over the past twenty-five years I have asked hundreds of Catholic college students the question: If you should die tonight and God asks you why he should let you into heaven, what would you answer? The vast majority of them simply do not know the right answer to this, the most important of all questions, the very essence of Christianity. They usually do not even mention Jesus!

Until we Catholics know the foundation, Protestants are not going to listen to us when we try to teach them about the upper stories of the building. Perhaps God allows the Protestant/Catholic division to persist not only because Protestants have abandoned many precious truths taught by the Church but also because many Catholics have never been taught the most precious truth of all, that salvation is a free gift of grace, accepted by faith. I remember vividly the thrill of discovery when, as a young Protestant at Calvin College, I read Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent on justification. I did not find what I had been told I would find, “another gospel” of do-it-yourself salvation by works, but a clear and forceful statement that we can do nothing without God’s grace, and that this grace, accepted by faith, is what saves us.

The split of the Protestant Reformation began when a Catholic discovered a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book. It can end only when both Protestants and Catholics do the same thing today and understand what they are doing: discovering a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book.

Comment by Norman Yerke | June 1, 2006 | Reply
I have a lot of respect for Peter Kreeft, he's an excellent philosopher.

However, in response to "faith and works" I think you might want to re-read this article – "Catholics have never been taught the most precious truth of all, that salvation is a free gift of grace, accepted by faith"

I think that is what makes me grieve for Roman Catholics. They do works, many works, but they do not have an assurance of salvation. They don't know whether or not they will go to heaven when they die. Kreeft makes this point in the above article.

Once you're saved, works will naturally follow.

Luther didn't remove any verses from James, well, he might have in his bible, but my New King James reads pretty much like my St. Joseph's translation.

If you have time, please check out my article on what James is saying: Faith or Works

Comment by bishopbooyah | June 1, 2006 | Reply
When considering any claim made in The Da Vinci Code, it is of the utmost importance to keep in mind that Dan Brown has stated, “How historically accurate is history itself?” While there is some legitimacy to this statement it is also a tool by which to deny any possibility of objectivism while likewise allowing one to deal creatively with historical facts. Let us not make the claim of pure subjectivism in history a self-fulfilling prophecy by dealing loosely with the facts—on purpose. If history is not historically accurate, how can Brown claim to base his novel of historical fact? This is a substandard double standard.

Comment by Mariano | January 30, 2007 | Reply