CHAPTER
I
SECTS AND OPUS DEI
9. Human Waste, Psychological
Destruction
Saralegui tells us: (115)
“It is because of this sense of
authority that
young members are separated from their families, forbidden to tell
their parents the true situation of their relations with the
Institution, their reading, their time, their social relations are
tightly controlled; they are denied attendance at shows, an internal
work is added to the professional one so that a critical, profound and
serene reflection is difficult for them. This spectacle of
psychological pressure on immature hearts and heads I have never been
able to approve of. There are other features of the Work that, like
everything human, have their face and their cross; this one for me has
been just a cross for many years.”
Why, if the Work is God's as they say, if its aims are good,
why so
much harm to so many?
In the Work some obtain many good things, at the cost of much damage,
based on much lack of love, with many people destroyed in their most
intimate existence.
Opus Dei is a phenomenon of the manifestation of
abnormalities of the physiological development.
The accounts follow quite similar patterns, in the accusations made
regularly. “I saw his behaviour
change”, said a mother of her own
daughter who had gone to Lakefield, the Opus Dei school in Hampstead,
London. She was a wonderful daughter and now she has become secretive
and introverted. (116)
Restrictions on girls seem to be based on the fear that, if they were
exposed to family events, bonds of affection would be quickly restored.
Attendance at baptisms or weddings is considered particularly
dangerous. At least two former members of Opus Dei in England have
explained that their decision to leave was prompted by Opus Dei's
refusal to allow them to be bridesmaids at their sisters' weddings.
Home visits are very rare, and are strictly regulated: a couple of
nights a year is all that is allowed. On one occasion a father, a truck
driver, met his daughter in London; she suddenly decided to go home
with him for a visit. An Opus Dei superior called the house and accused
the father of having kidnapped his own daughter.
The young people's relations with their families are practically
non-existent. The Work encourages a clear division between the
spiritual family and the natural family. Even Christmas is spent by the
numeraries with whom they make them believe that they are their
families: Opus Dei.
If there are deprogramming centers for members of Opus Dei, it is
because there must have been a program in place beforehand. That is
obvious. Brainwashing, as is the case here, can only be treated by
adequate clinical treatment, which gives back reasoning and free will
to the person subjected to the dictates of the organization. Through
religious manipulation, the psyche of the individual is broken,
altering his natural feelings and convictions, dragging him towards an
abyss of irrationality and fanaticism.
This is the effect known as "atypical dissociative disorder" (117) as
it is called by the American Psychiatric Association or "cult
conversion syndrome" as Dr. Clark calls it.
It is a denigrating and immoral fact that, by means of perfectly
studied techniques that violate the fragility of the human mind, people
are reduced by means of fears and coercion of a religious and spiritual
nature to states of servility and slavery before the unconsciousness of
the affected person.
Among the ways and means to annul the wills and to achieve the
pre-established ends are those of providing the subject with
insufficient nourishment. Weak organisms are more fragile than healthy
and robust bodies. It is quite normal for sects to establish special
diets which, in the long run, lead to malnutrition or to prohibit for
religious reasons a series of foods which may be basic to the diet.
Rest must be insufficient. It is necessary that the follower sleeps
little and badly, that he or she does not relax with a deep and
reparative sleep, that he or she does not regenerate. It is recommended
to be vigilant
at night, to be on guard, to be vigilant. Even
sleep is
interrupted at untimely hours with the excuse of doing certain prayers,
which, according to the leaders, do the spirit good,
when, in fact, the
effect of the lack of sleep is to undermine the resistance of
man. The bed should be uncomfortable, hard. We must offer this new
sacrifice to God.
An exhaustive and disproportionate, tiring, occupational activity must
be programmed for the individual. He must always be active, even if it
is in useless things, carrying out tasks of all kinds, from recruitment
to proselytizing, the development of professional work, religious
practices, the acts of self mortification, studies
and gatherings.
It
is necessary to imprint a frenetic and non-stop rhythm,
where there is no time to think. We have to create a sense of anguish
that we cannot do or finish the tasks and duties that we have to
undertake during the day, in order to feel vexed and guilty, useless,
not very holy, since sanctity is achieved when the impossible is
reached, when the unattainable is surpassed. With a stressful and
exhausting activity, with little time for rest and frugal and light
food, the organism deteriorates and the person degrades.
The information received must come from the Sect itself. It is
necessary to short-circuit the communication of the adept with the
outside world, to control all his movements, his hobbies, his feelings,
and his ideas, and to be accompanied, preferably.
One must attack the senses by blocking them. It is the sensory
attack
which prevents committing the permanent and
perennial sin. One
has to whip the senses by mitigating them, which will provoke
psychomotor atrophy and serious organic alterations. In order to
repress the senses, the sword of Damocles of punishment and penance
will always be sharp, for non-existent, figurative, artificial,
paranoid sins, but effective in producing a feeling of misery and inner
guilt in the human person, which will provoke vital anguish, polarizing
and dissociating the personality. It is the sect who sets the
guidelines of the pure and the impure, the recommendable and the
abominable, the just and the unjust, and the clan presses for the
fulfillment of the order and the exemplary punishment of deviations,
with humiliations and the contempt of companions and inner isolation.
Nervous exhaustion and terror. Here are two keys that are undermining
the rational capacity and empowering to unheard of extremes the
emotional one.
The effects of regression and childishness are achieved, which is
translated into the own and exiguous language used inside the sect with
ambiguous and complicit meanings. Childish words used by adolescents
and veterans.
With all this properly dosified, "group drug-dependence"
is achieved, the
sectarian affection without any restrictions. And what is worse, the
total and absolute destruction of the follower who has been reduced to
being a tool, an effective instrument for obedience and blind faith in
the designs imposed by the "Father" by obeying any of his whims as
unquestionable truths, as dogmas, coming to sink into the belief
that one is of his own free will in the sect and that the fanatics are
the others, the rest of humanity. Internal cohesion is consolidated by
huddling around the "Father" and considering any criticism from the
outside as serious slander. They have also
forbidden to make any kind of
criticism of the "Father" or the behaviour of the leaders of the sect.
They are slaves of our time, on the threshold of the 21st century.
Programmed and directed robots.
To this, it
must be added the suppression of the properties of the follower
that leave them insolvent and that to survive they have no choice but
to establish a steely dependence.
Once individuality has been suppressed, the depersonalizing objective
has been achieved.
Sometimes the important thing is not what you believe, but how you
believe it. (118)
They're like flies caught in a plate of honey. (119) To chain
oneself to Opus Dei is to lose all intellectual, volitional and
spiritual faculties in order to become an automaton, a puppet, at the
service of the Work and the "Father". Opus Dei is the comedy of
hypocrisy. Miguel Fisac acknowledges (120) that the only thing
Opus Dei
gave him was to suffer “authentic
spiritual martyrdom until he left”
and that “it was after he left Opus
Dei that he did more work and was
more interested in it”.
To succeed in deprogramming the followers is a slow task of
re-education. Snapping is necessary to begin a phase of recovery and
readjustment of the subject so that he or she can get back in touch
with reality and remove the hallucinations that have been imbued in the
Work.
REFERENCES
115. Moncada, "Historia oral del
Opus Dei", p. 123.
116. Walsh, p. 176.
117. Rodríguez, "Esclavos de
un mesías" ("Slaves of a
Messiah"),
p. 139.
118. Rodríguez, "El poder de
las sectas" ("The Power of Cults")
p. 30.
119. Nicolás Cobo, "Faro
inconfundible" ("Unmistakable
Lighthouse") (June 1988)
120. Miguel Fisac in "¿Por
qué no es usted del Opus Dei?"
("Why Aren't You in Opus Dei"), op cit, p 215.
Index of Chapter I
Previous Section
Next Section
Complete Index