Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about Opus Dei and THE DA VINCI CODE with John Allen:

Q: As someone who has studied this and written about it, how do you describe Opus Dei?

A: There really are two Opus Deis. There's the Opus Dei of myth, which is the Dan Brown DA VINCI CODE version, this kind of all-powerful, ultrawealthy organization that has hijacked the control of the Catholic Church, influencing financial markets around the world, and so on. Then there's the Opus Dei of reality, which is a group of 85,000 Catholics worldwide with fairly limited means and fairly limited influence, actually, whose purpose is to encourage people to see the details of their ordinary work as their pathway to holiness. As long as you understand that these are two different realities, it's fun to talk about the Opus Dei of myth, and sell a lot of books doing that, and make good movies, but if you confuse that with anything that actually exists in reality, then you get into trouble.

Q: Let's talk about the reality. What is their central message? What makes them unique?

A: Opus Dei was founded in 1928 by a Spanish priest, now a saint -- Jose Marie Escriva. His idea was to encourage lay Catholics, that is, ordinary men and women, to have the same deep, profound religious vocation that a priest or a nun would have, but to see their vocation taking shape in their ordinary, everyday work -- what he called sanctification of work. Whether you are a baker or an architect or a politician or a stay-at-home mom, you should see the details of what you do every day as the opportunity to make yourself holy and ultimately to make the world holy. And he created this group Opus Dei, which is a Latin phrase meaning "the work of God," to carry forward that idea. It's a very unique thing in the history of the Catholic Church, actually, because it's an organic body of priests and laymen and -women, all of whom share the same vocation and all of whom are united in one group. For a church that has long seen the clerical caste as the real spiritual warriors and laity largely as bystanders and observers, this was something of a revolution.

Q: And it has a special status within the Church.

A: Opus Dei is what's called a personal prelature, which is a category in the code of canon law, which is the body of law in the Catholic Church. It essentially means it's like a diocese, but the difference is membership is not defined by geography, that is, where you live. It's defined by your personal decision to join this group, therefore "personal." Basically, this was a category that was dreamed up in the early twentieth century because of the recognition that, social mobility being what it is, we can't just organize our pastoral service by geography anymore, because people move around too much. And so different categories were invented to create new pastoral structures. The idea of this personal prelature is one of [those] and, to date, Opus Dei is the only one, which has invested it with something of a mystique. But, in reality, most of the canon lawyers I know say that eventually there will be lots of other organizations that fit into this category, because it's a modern way of delivering spiritual care to people who are constantly on the move.

Q: You mentioned the mystique. What is it about this group that generates the fascination and the controversy?

A: That's the great detective story about Opus Dei. This is a group of 85,000 people worldwide. That's the same number of Catholics who are in the diocese of Hobart on the island of Tasmania off the coast of Australia. The difference is no one is writing best-selling novels about people from Hobart going around and slaying enemies of the Church and so on. Opus Dei is really a perfect storm in the sense that it is an intersection of several unrelated factors that have come together to invest it with this kind of mythic status that, frankly, its sociological profile doesn't deserve. One is the fact that very early on, in the late 1920s and early '30s in Spain, Opus Dei got involved in some border wars with the Jesuits, the flagship religious order in the Catholic Church, over vocations. The Jesuits perceived that some young Spanish men, instead of becoming Jesuit priests, were becoming members of Opus Dei, and this engendered some sense of rivalry. The Jesuits are a massive worldwide presence. If you want to pick a fight with somebody in Roman Catholicism, my advice would be don't make it the Jesuits, because they're smart, they're tenacious, and they have a worldwide infrastructure. Everywhere Opus Dei went these controversies followed, so automatically Opus Dei became a point of controversy within the Church because of that. Then you have the fact that Opus Dei grew up in Spain during the era of fascism, so there's a tendency to associate it with Franco and fascism and so on. In the post-Vatican II period in the Catholic Church, this upheaval in the life of the Church, a period of modernization and liberalization to some extent -- in the culture wars in the Church that followed that period, Opus Dei became a symbol of the kind of conservative reaction against the council, fairly or unfairly. So it became an ideological football. Liberals felt themselves obliged to dislike Opus Dei simply because of what they perceived it represented, and conservatives often would defend it, in both cases often without having met anyone from Opus Dei, never having gone to an Opus Dei center, but simply on the basis of this framework knowing whether it was good or bad. And then finally, Opus Dei was the beloved elder child of John Paul II. He was fascinated by Escriva's message. He elevated Opus Dei in a lot of different ways. What that means is that people who liked the pope liked Opus Dei, and people who didn't disliked it. All of these forces came together to give Opus Dei this mystique as sort of the Darth Vader of the Catholic Church that, to be honest, its relatively limited finances, its limited influence, and its small size simply don't support.

Q: What about the allegations that it's closed, it's secretive and almost cultlike?

A: If you define a cult as people who are potentially dangerous to themselves or others, I don't think you can make that case for Opus Dei. I think the perception about Opus Dei being secretive probably has more to do [with the fact] that it's unique than there's some kind of conspiracy going on. It has a very idiosyncratic conception of itself. It has its own vocabulary and structure that [are] hard for people on the outside to penetrate and understand. Further, I think over the years Opus Dei has been its own worst enemy on this score, in that they find it difficult to even give basic information about the organization -- not because it's a cover-up, but they feel it's going to be misunderstood. For example, they believe that all of the Opus Dei schools and hospitals out there are locally owned and operated, that is, Opus Dei is not a holding company. So, if you go to Opus Dei and ask, "How much are you worth, how much money do you have?" they can't answer that question. For my book, I actually had to go around and collect financial data from all of these independent operations and then put together a global picture. When I showed it to Opus Dei they said, "My God, this seems right." But they had never done it themselves. Membership would be another example. They take the position that because they are laypeople, that is, they are not members of a religious community, they don't want to stand out from anyone else. They leave it up to the member to decide how much to say about whether or not they are in Opus Dei, which means, when somebody famous is rumored to be an Opus Dei member, like Clarence Thomas or Mel Gibson, you can't go to Opus Dei and get them to say yes or no. You actually have to track down these people, which, once again, I had to do for the book. Seen from the inside, this is about protecting their identity. It's not about pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. But seen from the outside, it can often look like there is a kind of con going on here. I think Opus Dei has gotten better over the years, but there is some ground for them to cover.