1170: Gareth Gore | This Vatican Cult Corrupts Courts and Sells Slaves

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Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Most normal organizations, when confronted with like super serious allegations of like human trafficking, grooming of kids, drugging your own members, spiritual abuse, breaking the seal of confession, they would come out and they would say, these are really serious allegations.

We are going to take them very seriously.

We're going to investigate them, get to the bottom of them.

And if anyone needs to be brought to justice, we'll ensure that's done.

Opus Day's response has been stick its fingers in its ears and go, la la la la la la la, this guy's a liar.

This guy's a liar.

And I think that's really quite telling.

This is an organization that has zero intentions of addressing its failures and addressing abuse inside of its ranks.

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Today on the show, we're talking about a cult, a century-plus old cult that permeates the Catholic Church, involves legislators, bankers, even justices of the Supreme Court right here in the United States.

It's called Opus Day.

And if you've seen the Da Vinci Code, you have a bit of an introduction to it, maybe a little fictionalized introduction to it.

The truth of this cult, actually, I find even stranger than the book and the movie, albeit without the murderous albino monk.

Here to unwind all the craziness is investigative journalist Gareth Gore, who started investigating the downfall of a major bank and found the insanely strange rabbit hole that we're discussing here today.

All right, here we go with Gareth Gore.

Thanks for coming down here, man.

TYX Studios hooking up this place is, it's, well, first of all, one of the nicest studios in London, but thanks for coming on down.

I know we tried to do this before.

I have to say, when you first pitched me this, And I'm sure that I'm not the first person to give you this reaction.

I thought, okay, what kind of Looney Tune, QAnon, conspiracy theory nonsense is this?

Because because it just it actually sounds too insane and then I obviously as our conversation continued I realized oh okay this guy brought receipts this is not like a weird internet meme conspiracy thing this is a historical cult that has just

not been put in check for how long a hundred years almost a hundred years it's shocking I read the whole book if I didn't read the book I still probably wouldn't actually believe you

so hopefully the audience comes along for the right here because it is one of those things where it's so ridiculous you You just think, how is this possible?

What led you to investigate connections between this secretive group and the United States Supreme Court?

I mean, you're not alone in having that conclusion.

I think even people that have been inside Opus Day are still years later trying to work out what the hell happened to them.

Yeah, what happened?

Yes, exactly.

But I mean, so I fell into this completely by accident.

So I am a financial reporter by background.

Okay.

And basically what happened was that in 2017, a huge bank in Spain just collapsed overnight, which kind of, you know, in this day and age isn't it.

It can happen.

I was there for the 2008 financial crisis.

Banks collapsed.

Precisely.

And in fact, up until that point, the previous 10 years, I'd spend a lot of time kind of traveling to Sweden, Germany, Russia even, reporting on bank failures and kind of reporting from the ground, trying to work out what happened.

And at first, it seemed like the same old story of like, you know, this bank, a bunch of guys, and they were almost all guys, had, you know, taken too many risks, allowed things to get out of control and kind of were too embarrassed to admit to their mistakes and so the whole thing crumbled into dust it seemed like that was the story and so I and almost everyone else that reported this story wrote that and kind of moved on but there was something about the story that kind of seemed a bit odd for one most of the shareholders that lost their money tried to sue, tried to get some of the money back.

Because, you know, literally their shares went from, I don't know, like 100 euros to zero overnight.

And so they were like, what the hell?

We want to get some of this back.

So they were all suing.

They're all these court cases.

But the biggest shareholder of all, this kind of group which called itself the syndicate,

not ominous at all.

Yes, if you're going to pick a name, then.

Yeah, we want to fly low-key, so we're calling ourselves the syndicate, but you have to say it with a low tone and look over your shoulder before you say it.

I mean, that is actually, it's comically ridiculous.

Yes.

I mean, and like so many elements of this story, you almost have to pinch yourself and you're like, is this for real?

Right.

It's like Dr.

Evil inventing this.

It's just, you know,

if you're trying to run run your cults under the radar, you guys are blowing it.

Yes, it's not the way to do it.

But so this group seemed to be, whilst everyone else was suing, they seemed to be kind of intent on just quietly disappearing.

So that piqued my interest.

And so I began to dig and I basically fell into this rabbit hole, which I almost feel like I'm yet to emerge because every time I feel like I'm kind of crawling out, I'm done with the book or whatever.

Something else drags me back in.

Someone contacts me or whatever.

And you're like, oh my goodness.

It's either Goodfellows or the Godfather where the guy says, every time I try to get out, they suck me right back in.

It's one of those mafia movies.

So the cult is called Opus Day for people who are wondering what that is.

Is it O-P-U-S-D-E-I two words?

Which is Latin for the work of God.

I think the audience is going to either have never heard of them or some people will go, wait, isn't that from the Da Vinci Code?

And we'll get into that in a bit.

So the book starts with.

The collapse of this bank is Banco Popular or Banco Popular for us Americans out there.

And this is not a small bank that just went under.

It's not like they just had a couple locations or they were headquartered in Madrid.

This is like a, I won't say it's the JP Morgan Chase, but it's a massive bank chain, right?

It was one of the top five banks in Spain.

They had thousands of branches across the country.

It was impossible to walk around a city like Madrid or Barcelona without seeing one of these branches.

So, you know, every Spaniard knew this bank, absolutely.

What happened if your money was in the bank when it collapsed?

So all the shareholders lost all of the money.

Right.

The bondholders, they lost billions too.

So the bank was kind of sold overnight in this kind of fire sale.

For parts, basically.

For parts.

It was sold for one Euro to Banco Santandero, which is one of the largest banks in the world.

For one Euro?

For one Euro.

Okay.

Well, fine.

So as part of that deal, they acquired all of the bank's kind of assets and debts.

They also acquired, and this is key to the story, and we can get into this later, they also acquired the bank's old archives, which suddenly opened up this whole story to someone like me who came knocking on the door asking to see the see the receipts.

I'm surprised that they they were willing to show you that stuff i suspect i still haven't asked them why but um i suspect they didn't know what they were sitting on i think it was literally that they had acquired this warehouse full of papers and they were like well that's it's probably like really boring stuff if you want to waste your time going through that stuff go right ahead don't expect us to supply the coffee this mess is not ours so even if he finds something then it's not you know i mean they're right yeah they bought it for one euro and they basically probably what saved the depositors who had their funds in there so they're like we're the the hero of the story.

That's not going to change if you find something that the other thing did.

It just makes us look better for having not dropped the ball on all these people's funds.

That's true.

So I assume there's smoke there's fire, right?

So were there any shareholders that didn't lose money because they, I don't know, liquidated their shares a couple months prior?

Basically, did anybody have a heads up that this was going to happen and bail?

I don't think so.

I mean, it was kind of a slow train wreck.

You know, these things often are.

And so the funny thing is, actually, the Opus Day foundations that were benefiting from the bank and which were semi-controlling it, they basically put more and more money into the bank as it started to disintegrate because for them, it had been their cash cow for so many years and it had been such a core part of how the cult had kind of grown.

It was their access to huge amounts of

money.

It was the golden use for many years.

And so I think they lost.

as much as everyone else because they were desperate not to lose control of this thing.

And so they just kept putting in money right until the end.

Oh, I see.

So how did the bank collapse?

Because don't you kind of have to be abusively negligent with funds in order to lose that kind of business yeah i mean the bank was like massively overexposed to the whole real estate sector in spain i see which collapsed from post 2008 it there was just kind of a very slow collapse never recovered okay i see i see so before we get into what you found in those bank records because i'm i'm gonna guess it's not nothing uh otherwise we wouldn't be here let's do a little bit of background on opus day the cult We don't have to get too in the weeds on the history of the people who started it or whatever, but it sure sounds like it started, like you said, almost 100 years ago, and it kind of just sounded like a labor trafficking organization, for lack of a better word.

Okay, so Opus Day kind of means the work of God, was dreamed up, I guess you might say, or by this Spanish priest called Jose Maria Escrivar.

He went on retreat in 1928, and whilst on retreat, he had this, what he called a vision.

He said it was directly from God for this kind of new organization.

These guys never make business plans.

They just get downloads directly from God, right?

They can't just sit around and make something up yourself.

It's interesting you kind of, you said that, because it's impossible to know for sure.

But my interpretation is, so he'd come from this family that had basically fallen from grace.

They were a wealthy family whose father basically, whose business went bankrupt.

And so they'd known the good times.

They had all these servants.

And then suddenly they kind of hit rock bottom.

The father died.

And this guy, Jose Maria, as the eldest son, I think he felt this huge weight on his shoulders of having to kind of bring the family back up to its kind of proper status.

So I think he really was on the hunt for a business idea.

Yeah, it sounds like it.

Yeah.

It sounds like it.

And he maybe didn't have the acumen to start a proper business.

So he's like, a cult, why not?

Yeah.

And at one stage, he trained as a priest, which is not, it wasn't that abnormal for the oldest son at that stage in Spain.

In fact, my partner's uncle, who's the eldest man in the family, he also trained as a priest.

Not Olpa's Day.

He didn't join a cult, but

he had a hard brain at her.

She was also from that part of Spain.

So he went on this retreat and he got this vision.

And his idea was there was a gap in the market.

So if you're a Catholic, you're either kind of an everyday Catholic.

You go to Mass every Sunday, you confess, whenever you sin or whatever, you're either that, or if you want to go a bit deeper, you become a priest or a nun.

And there was nothing in between.

And he's like, you know what?

There's a little niche here I could carve out for myself.

Sure.

And so what he did was he invented this new organization, which was for ordinary Catholics, but it allowed them to go deeper into their faith.

So this is like, you're not the people who go to to the gym three times a week you're not the people who become professional athletes you're the people who want to go to the gym every single day maybe you're running a triathlon it's like we need those catholics we want the ones who want to because they have these rituals that are serious and i want to talk about some of these i don't want to get ahead of ourselves here the recruiting process for this sounds a little bit like scientology it's like hey you don't need those pesky friends and family that aren't into this as much as you you got to hang out with us we're the ones who are really heads down on this and the love bombing about how great it is and how you're doing like you said god's work or they named the thing God's work, right?

And it just starts to spread among, was it students at first?

Was that yeah, students initially, well, I mean, to begin with, he really struggled to get any recruits.

I mean, he became so desperate at one stage that he went kind of to sit beside this dying woman to kind of give her the last rites, whatever.

And he said to her, you know what?

When you get upstairs, when you get to heaven, could you maybe like intercede?

Could you maybe kind of send down a miracle for me to help me get some followers?

At another stage, he almost quit the priesthood entirely because it just wasn't working out.

In the first five years, he had something like eight followers or whatever.

He was getting desperate.

Right.

He's like the worst influencer ever.

Imagine asking a dead person, like, I just have a quick favor.

When you get up there, can you just ask God to do me a solid?

It's like, I'm going to be the new guy or the new gal.

I don't know how much cloud I'm going to have.

You know what?

Maybe it works because, you know, they have almost 100,000 members these days.

So maybe, maybe that chat paid off.

I'm not sure.

But I asked God to give me the blue check mark.

That's basically what he's asking for.

But he started to hone his methods and he very quickly came up with this kind of blueprints for recruitment.

It very quickly became very culty as well.

He talked about how you should never target people as a group.

You should try and pick them off one by one.

Never go after someone who's older than 25 because his belief was that once you hit 25, you began to ask too many questions.

You became kind of set in your ways and it was hard to...

Your prefrontal cortex is developed and you won't fall into this nonsense anymore.

Absolutely.

And also like he

told the people that he targeted, he told them not to tell the friends or family that they were considering joining.

And so, you know, there are all of these real kind of red flags for anyone on the outside.

Maybe cults were kind of not as widespread as they are now.

In some ways, he was ahead of his time.

I mean, in some ways, I've got to take my hat off to him and be like, wow, I mean, this is way before Hubbard and Scientology and the rest of it.

And to be fair, the last cult that really took off was Christianity.

I know that's going to ruffle some feathers, but look, we're talking about the year zero.

It was by all definitions sort of a cult.

It was just maybe a little bit less creepy than Opus Day or Scientology.

And so once he got these guys in, they were generally expected to live in an Opus Day residence.

So that, you know, they could be watched and controlled 24 hours a day.

And then they were given this thing that they call the plan of life, which is basically a schedule of prayer, mortification, and all kinds of other requirements.

Okay, so what's mortification?

Because this is just one of the weird practices of the members.

And I think people who've seen, is it the Da Vinci Code movie?

Yes.

They show a little bit of that there, and it's decidedly creepy.

Yes, and there are lots of things about the Da Vinci Code which are completely internalized.

You don't say.

Okay.

So it's not a historically accurate movie.

Tarn.

That's, that's, yeah, that's.

Thanks for coming in.

Yeah.

But some elements are true.

And so the corporal mortification, okay, what is that?

It basically means hurting yourself, punishing your body.

Corporal mortification is something that Christians have done for hundreds of years, but it's kind of fallen out of practice.

So mortification, mortified now means embarrassed, but I suppose before it means like some sort of degradation, essentially.

Yeah.

Just like carrying the heavy wooden cross on your back, kind of.

Absolutely.

It's bringing yourself closer to Christ by kind of feeling the pain, I guess, that he felt on the cross.

And yeah, people do that in various different ways.

The two ways in Elba's day, there are two kind of primary methods.

There are other smaller things, but the two main ones, they have these two devices.

One is called the silis, which is like a a barbed wire that you wear around a part of your body normally the thigh so you attach it to the thigh and these kind of claws dig into your thigh you wear it for like two hours a day it's like a dog collar one of those pinchy dog collars it's kind of like a chain it's kind of like a it's a wire like a spiky barbed wire with these spikes that kind of go onto the inside so whenever you sit down you wear this under your trousers or whatever oh under your pants whenever you sit down it digs into your leg why would you sit down why would you do anything yeah why would you put that thing on in the first place They're asking the real questions.

But you can wear it around other parts of your body.

So for example, the founder of Upper Stay, this guy called Escriva, he was kind of obsessed with his weight.

And so he wore this thing around his waist, possibly as punishment, also for his kind of gluttonous habits.

So one thing is a psilis, this kind of chain.

The other thing is called a discipline, which is basically a whip.

Normally it's a rope, maybe three, four, five, six strands.

And you take off your shirts.

Sometimes you take off your pants as well, and you whip yourself over your shoulder.

The founder of Upper Stay took this to a whole new level.

So he would attach razor blades to the end of the rope.

So whenever he hit himself on the back, the razor blades would cut into his skin.

And, you know, his followers would write about going into the room after he'd been doing this and there'd be blood like spattered on his face.

Oh my gosh.

It's pretty

gnarly.

It started out like something they do at Pride Parade in San Francisco and ended up like a Japanese horror movie.

That's really gross, man.

It is really gross.

And you know, like these practices go on today as well.

So people are still whipping themselves with the the cat of five tails or whatever this guy had.

Absolutely.

People are still doing this.

In fact, there are different kinds of members of Opposite.

But if you're kind of one of the elite members, these so-called numeries, you're expected to wear the sillis for two hours every single day without fail.

And you're meant to do the discipline once a week on Saturdays.

So yeah, it's kind of all part of the plan of life.

You can't pick your own flogging methods, I guess.

Life is so prescribed.

So, you know, you get up at a certain time every day.

The first thing you do is you get out of bed.

You're not allowed to kind of dawdle for even a second.

It's called the heroic minute.

You get out of bed, you kiss the floor, and the first word you say is serveam, which means I serve God.

Okay, so you're like a robot at this point.

You're kind of like a robot.

And then you have a whole day of mass.

You say like 15 different prayers.

You've got these corporal mortification things to do.

And you're also meant to go out to work and recruit people as well.

Wow.

So they're super pious, but somehow they're also thieves that ended up bankrupting a bank somehow.

I mean, is that a fair assessment at all?

Well, I mean, there's this whole culture inside of Olbus Day, which is that you should do whatever's necessary to basically expand the movement.

And to, so Escrieval called, he saw his followers as part of this kind of hidden militia that would infiltrate society and use their positions there to basically push society in the right direction.

That's extra creepy, right?

That's the part where it's like...

You go from, hey, let people do what they want if they're going to be religious fanatics.

We have religious freedom in this country.

Let them do what they want.

They're not hurting anybody but themselves.

And then it's like, oh, actually, they're seeking to control.

It's ironic because I'm guessing these are the same people that spread conspiracies about Jews controlling the world.

And they're like, no, really, though, we're trying to do that.

Well, you know what?

Escrival was something of a conspiracy theorist himself.

I see.

And there was quite a big evolution.

So initially when it started out, that the group was in the kind of late 20s, early 30s, like I said before, it was basically this kind of elite organization to help Catholics just to kind of go a bit deeper.

Like the backdrop here is super important because, so this is Spain, early 1930s, a country on the brink of civil war.

Like the workers have literally risen up, overthrown the monarchy, and they're beginning to turn their backs on things like the church.

So the church for centuries had controlled large parts of society, not least education.

And so people were like, what the hell?

We don't want this.

Like, so you said civil war.

Sorry to interrupt.

This is civil war.

So it's like the communists versus, or am I too early for that?

I mean, there were some communist elements, but it was more generally, I mean, it was kind of a coalition of the left.

I mean, literally the workers rose up and were like, we were sick of the old order.

So they kicked out the monarchy.

I see.

And the socialists and a coalition took over and they started to unpick the church's dominance over society.

They secularized education, this kind of stuff, things which are quite common these days.

So Escriva sees what's happening around him and he's absolutely horrified.

And so he begins to transform this group that he's begun to grow.

And his writings become really quite aggressive.

He thinks there's a massive conspiracy going on.

He thinks the Jews, the communists, and the masons are teaming up to like overthrow Christianity.

Right.

Meanwhile, the Jews are just like, leave us alone.

Yeah, come on.

No, and so he kind of rethinks the whole idea of Opposede and he turns it into basically a kind of a political organization.

He sees his followers as this kind of militia.

And he literally tasks them with infiltrating government, business, the world of education, becoming journalists, and kind of using their positions there to be this kind of guerrilla reactionary force that will fight back against these conspiracies.

But is it domestic only at this time or are they trying to Christianize the whole planet?

He sees what's happening in Spain as part of this global battle.

He calls it the re-Christianization of the world.

I'm guessing that kind of thing doesn't happen peacefully.

Yes.

Well, no, he talks about, you know, people fighting and he very much sees it as a battle between his followers and what he calls the enemies of Christ.

Anyone that isn't part of Opus Day is an enemy of Christ.

So yes, at this stage, it's just in Spain, but in the 1940s, it begins to go international.

What does the Pope think about all this at this point?

Is this like, oh, okay, those are the hardcore Catholics?

Or

are they secret and the Pope doesn't know about it?

At first, they kind of not really on the Vatican's radar.

Esquivar is expanding the kind of the organization diocese by diocese.

So he goes into each diocese, which is kind of for for non-Catholics or it's just kind of a local area kind of thing.

Like a county, but for Catholics?

Yeah, kind of.

And he goes to the bishop in charge there and says, hey, would you mind if we set up a residence and we kind of, you know, we're doing good work here, you know, whatever.

But some bishops are kind of a bit suspicious.

So he decides at some stage, you know what?

I need authorization from the Vatican itself because then we can go anywhere.

And we don't have to ask permission.

And in, I think it's 46, he gets permission from the Vatican to do his work wherever.

And that kind of opens up the horizons.

and very quickly they start to expand to Portugal, across Europe, and even to the States.

So, who's leading Spain at this time?

Is this already the time of Franco?

Is he like a military dictator?

Is that fair?

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, Escriva, this supposedly deeply Christian guy, has absolutely no qualms about cozying up to this brutal dictator.

To be fair, that was De Rigueur for the...

Wasn't the Vatican sort of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during this period of time as well?

It's not like the highest moral standing that can be done.

That is true.

But I mean, actually, the victory of franco in the civil war is like a critical moment for the group before the war you know he had all these grand ideas but he really struggled to recruit he comes back into madrid in i think it's march 39 he literally rides into madrid on the back of this military truck alongside all these francoist troops and he arrives in this city that's been absolutely decimated hunger is everywhere you've got kids kind of like hunting through garbage piles for potato skins.

They want something to eat.

Women are selling their bodies because it's the only way to get money, money, get some food.

You've got all of these diseases that have not been seen since the medieval times kind of coming back.

So he is a good Catholic Christian priest.

He arrives back and sees all this.

And what does he do?

Does he go out and help the people?

No, no.

He sets about making money and expanding his business, this thing he calls the family business.

And very quickly he starts cozying up to the regime, offering Opus Day services.

He basically offers to kind of go into team up with the regime.

And he offers Opus Day as a service to basically hunt out any kind of of subversive groups out there in factories and on the farms and to kind of help to kind of damp down any kind of political uprisings or whatever.

He also sets up all of these residences and Franco, like for people that don't know much about the Franco years, he was an absolutely brutal dictator.

Even after the war, obviously both sides committed atrocities during the war, but during peacetime, After the ceasefire, he murdered tens of thousands of his political opponents.

He pushed like hundreds of thousands of people into concentration camps.

He was sending left-wing people to the Nazis to be experimented on.

Oh, wow.

And meanwhile, Escriva, the founder of Opus Day, is offering Opus Day services to help this guy.

Escriva's hosting private retreats for Franco and his wife at the palace outside of Madrid.

You know, it's incredible just how much of a blind eye he turns.

So Franco's like a minor Hitler-esque character.

in a way.

Yeah, and he actually wanted to, he really tried to cozy up to Hitler and offered him all kinds of things to help him.

Hitler, I think, very much looked down on his membership.

Jeez.

My gosh, these are some despicable characters.

So the new members of this cult, I assume eventually these students who are in Opus Day, they've start to form companies and come of age and get the are they getting the jobs to have influence and are they being placed now that they've sort of won the civil war and they're on the good side or the side of they're on Franco's good side.

They're able to, I don't know, work in the government or something like that.

Yeah, no, no totally so what happens is that escriva's got this vision of his members need to infiltrate the kind of upper echelons of society in order to shape society he's recruiting very much people from the elite people from good families people from money people who've got great prospects you know tomorrow's leaders he's recruiting them at university and so like five ten years after recruiting them many of these people are really climbing up the ladder by the 50s a number of ministers in the kind of national government are members of Opus Day.

And, you know, the Opus Day network runs far and wide.

Opus Day itself has several businesses, but also many of its members are kind of deeply embedded into a really corrupt society as well.

And so it's all through connection.

So the closeness of Opus Day to the regime means that a lot of its members and Opus Day itself gets lots of favors.

So they get like export deals, they get the nod to like open up this new business.

And so it becomes very beneficial financially as well.

So it's a revenue generating enterprise at this point.

It's not just get the rich kids and they'll get their parents to send us money.

Now it's we've got special sweetheart deals with the government because we're cozying up to the dictator.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

That's another sort of left turn into making this a little bit more evil, right?

It's like, okay, if you want to whip yourself, not, you know, not, we don't love it, but okay.

And then it's like, no, we're trying to take over the world and we're going to do that by cozying up to this really crappy regime.

And they're slowly getting more and more evil kind of from the sound of it.

And slowly getting bigger and bigger.

I mean, by the 50s, they were present in, I don't know, like something, like 20 countries, including the States.

They've expanded to Latin America, across Europe.

They have thousands of members.

And, you know, as this thing grows, the speed of expansion becomes greater because they've got more and more resources.

Sure.

And so they can open more residences, more schools, and whatever.

So the recruitment method becomes much more kind of efficient.

At what point do they go, hey, we need a bank?

How does that come about?

By the early 50s, they had already had a pretty big network of companies in spain they had bookshops and publishers they had like a film distribution company so like you know they were the equivalent of like minting kind of vhs cassettes kind of things sure back in you know for i mean it's kind of but it would these were ways to make money but i think they very quickly realized that there was a limit to how much this network of businesses could generate and by getting the kind of hands on a bank that would take them to a very different level because suddenly you've got access to this massive pool of savings that all the depositors have put in there.

Like banks have balance sheets in the trillions of dollars.

Wow.

Of course, we're not talking that level of money back then in the 1950s and certainly not in Spain.

It took you from here to the ceiling.

The way they got into the bank as well is kind of extraordinary.

So I think it was the chief executive of the bank or the vice chairman or something.

He found out about some dodgy deal that the chairman had done.

And he, as a good Catholic, was like,

this kind of is really eating at me.

I need to like share this with someone.

he was friends with someone from Opus Day and so he decides to basically open up his heart to this Opus Day guy thinking that the Opus Day guys you know as another good Christian he's gonna just give him some kind of confidential advice and you know pat him on the back tell him you know the moral thing to do instead the opus day goes back and informs all of his colleagues back at the center and they come up with a plan to use this bit of information to oust the chairman and take control of the bank themselves.

So it's like an intelligence network instead of a confession booth.

Yeah, and they hijacked this bank.

And

that alongside the victory of Franco, this is the other critical moment in Opus Day's history where they suddenly take this turn and the sky's the limit.

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i know at some point it becomes about bringing in poor people from other countries or other parts of the country and kind of using them to serve the members.

I mean, this is also sort of very, I hate to use the same example over and over.

It's very Scientology, right?

They do those audits on you where you have to confess things and then they use it against you later.

Yep.

And they bring in kids from the Midwest and they basically say, oh, you're going to go to Hollywood and hang out with Tom Cruise.

And all you have to do is work for free full-time in our museum or whatever.

I mean, it's very much a similar recipe from the sound of it.

Honestly, I was going to say except for the religious thing, but Scientology has that too.

The thing that makes this so much worse is that this is an organization which has been legitimized by the Catholic Church.

It's an official part part of the Catholic Church.

It has the stamp of approval from the Pope, from the Vatican.

Wow.

With Scientology, people are like, ah, just a minute.

This is like just some crazy pokey people.

Yeah.

I'm like, wait, aliens?

What are you talking about?

But with Opus Day, people, I think when they're first introduced to Opus Day, especially until recently, when there wasn't much information about it, they just assume, well, there must be good people.

They have the, you know, the stamp of approval.

So what they need, and I guess this is what you were alluding to, is they need workers because they need people to go out there and to find targets, to groom them, and to pounce, to get them into the group.

They have this kind of elite army, I would call them, of people called numeries.

These are people who've taken, they're not quite vows, but they've basically promised their lives to Opus Day.

They take these pledges of poverty, which means that they give all of their money to Opus Day.

They take a pledge of chastity, which means that...

basically they're married to Opus Day.

And they also, which I guess is related to that, they take a pledge of obedience.

So whatever Opus Day requires of them, they do it.

This is the kind of core group, the numeries, and they live in special gender-segregated Opus Day residences.

They have a director watching over them who tells them kind of what to do, who to target.

And they're constantly under pressure to go out there and find recruits.

So you have those guys, the kind of the key workers.

But at one stage in the 40s, the founder kind of realized that I guess they were spending a lot of money.

on domestic servants at the residences.

So they had all of these women who coming in to like cook and clean for the men.

And numeries can be men and women, but they always had these kind of servant girls who would come in.

And he came up with this idea of, why don't we open up membership to these servants?

But they weren't allowed to join on the same terms as the other numeries.

So he kind of invented this new class, this underclass of membership called the numery servants.

And they were all women.

This is not a class opened up to men.

And you know, you're basically kind of you would join as a servant.

And

in a way, it became a source of free labor for Opus Day because once these servants became members, they were expected to hand over their paychecks back to Opus Day.

So Opa Day was paying them and then saying, Semit, you need to give that back to us.

And at one stage, just didn't bother paying them.

Why bother?

And the creation of this new subclass was the greatest gift that God had ever given to Opus Day.

This goes on today.

And soon there's going to be a trial in Argentina where Opus Day has been formally accused of human trafficking.

Yeah, that's what this is.

It's slavery.

It's not a gift from God.

You're just enslaving people.

Absolutely.

And Opus Day to this day operates this network of what it calls hospitality schools around the world.

Yeah, there's a euphemism.

There's a absolutely euphemism.

And what they do is they go around to poor communities, they knock on the doors, they find young girls.

They find girls who are like 11, 12 years old.

Oh, geez, like actually very young girls.

They're kids.

They find kids.

And they say to the kids and their parents, hey, you know, like around here, there are no prospects for your girl.

But if you you send her back to the big city with us, you know, over in Lagos or over in Buenos Aires or over in Mexico City, we run this amazing school where we teach the girls how to cook and clean and they work towards a qualification.

It's a way to a better life for them.

And so the girls and the parents, they're like,

these guys are from the Catholic Church.

How bad can it be?

How bad can it be?

Well, yes.

And the girls, only when they're kind of hundreds of miles away from their families, do they perhaps realize what's happening?

And they are manipulated, coerced, pushed into joining Gopus Day as these numery servants.

It's a huge scandal and it's happening all over the world across Latin America and Nigeria, the Philippines.

And to be clear, this is not 1950 where this is happening.

This is still happening in 2025.

Absolutely.

So there's this trial that's about to happen in Argentina.

Some women have recently come forward in Mexico.

But I know for a fact, because the bank in Spain was financing the creation of all of these schools.

Sure, yeah.

So in the archives, I found all kinds of documents, which

basically there's a whole network of these schools financed by the bank.

I don't know exactly how many, but we're talking dozens, if not hundreds, of these different schools around the world.

That's a great segue into what else you found in those bank archives, because it just seems to me if they were doing something so awful, they would have...

tried to get rid of the records.

But then I think, okay, the Germans and the Holocaust, they used IBM machines and they tracked everything and they, sure, they burned some stuff, but there was just too much to get rid of.

is that the same kind of situation we're dealing with here yeah I mean I think

I mean the funny thing is I mean the collapse of the bank whilst terrible for all of the investors you know was great for was great for me because it worked out well for you yeah because I mean like nobody would have ever been given access to those records They never expected in their wildest dreams that the bank would collapse.

Sure.

And then someone like me would come around sniffing around, kind of trying to piece things together.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I think there was just maybe it was a similar thing with the Nazis.

They just didn't think they were ever going to get caught.

They didn't think they were going to lose.

They didn't think they were going to have any accountability, right?

If you own a bank, it's like, oh, you can keep track of this.

No one's going to, it's our bank.

No one's going to look at it here.

And also, a lot of these guys, you know, the founder of Opposed Day

had this kind of, these kind of phrases where he talked about things like holy ruthlessness and holy intransigence, which basically the message is, anything goes.

If you're doing what God wants, then it's kind of okay to cut a few corners or to do a few wrong things.

He actually told one of his followers, actually the guy that was leading the bank, he said, when you look around and you see people doing bad things, don't worry too much because you're probably going to see these guys again in heaven.

It's kind of fine.

God will kind of look the other way for certain things.

So I'm not a religious scholar, but I feel like the religious teachings of Jesus, et cetera, were not like, you can just do whatever you want.

God's on our side.

It's cool.

We're just going to look the other way.

And, you know, by any means necessary.

That doesn't seem like something Jesus would have said.

and also like catholicism has this kind of um unique kind of get out of jail free card as well if you confess and you repent it's all fine right i mean this is this is coming to you from the people who were like hey your relative is in the seventh circle of hell and if you want to get them up a few notches just give us a bunch of money the corruption in this particular organization is not brand new yeah no absolutely geez oh my goodness but yeah i mean i mean like so because they didn't think they were ever going to get caught i mean this kind of stuff i found i mean there was one incident where one of the bank's employees an opus day member had been sent to Venezuela with a suitcase full of money.

And we don't know exactly what it was for, but it was probably to start up a new Opus Day school there.

Anyway, he got arrested because actually the Venezuelan police thought he was a communist and it caused this big kind of diplomatic incident.

This was before they loved communists in Venezuela, I suppose.

Well, yeah, this is in the 60s, actually, when Venezuela was like kind of oil boom kind of guy.

And this guy gets caught.

There's this whole diplomatic incident.

And all these negotiations, he gets sent back to Spain.

And when he comes back to Spain, he's collected at the airport by a bunch of OpenSDA minders who then put him into this mental asylum because they're worried that he's kind of going to crack and he's going to tell everyone what he was really up to and where the money came from and all this stuff.

And then he basically disappears.

Now, this whole story is kind of documented in the bank's archives.

Wow.

And you, you know, like so many times in researching the book, you kind of come across something and you're like, what?

Like, and you almost can't believe what you're reading.

Yeah.

But it's there in black and white.

You back it up with other evidence and you almost have to pinch yourself.

Yeah, there's some incredible stories like that in the book.

Yeah, there are quite a few stories like that in the book as well.

It seems like the group Opus Day begins to ask Catholics to essentially exert their influence in professional and political spheres.

There's a Supreme Court justice in the United States that's in this cult, correct?

We don't know because membership of Opus Day is completely private.

Okay.

but we do know that in the early 2000s maybe your listeners will have heard of this thing called the federalist society yeah i had a branch in my law school oh really and how was that i just remember they were conservative and a couple of my friends were in it and they're like you should join it's right up your alley but i don't really know much else i i'm not sure so i mean one of the the most powerful guys inside the federalist society is a guy called leonard leo who is a huge fan of opus day he's given a huge amount of money to opus day he sent his kids to the opus day schools in washington dc he sits on the board of directors at the opus day center in central washington i mean he has been the person who's probably single-handedly most responsible for the kind of shift of the supreme court over the past 10 years or whatever in the early 2000s there was this incident at a party which this only came out recently where a boss from the Federal Society and maybe that was Leo, maybe it was someone else.

There was this incident where at a party where I think Chief Justice Roberts had either just been appointed to the court or was about to be appointed.

And this big boss from the Federalist Society said, don't worry, he attends Opus Day evenings of recollection kind of once a week.

He's one of us.

You don't need to worry about him.

Whether or not that means he's a member or not, I'm not sure.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, that's really kind of scary.

Yes.

Can you provide any sort of overview of methods or tactics that the groups use to influence political or maybe judicial decisions in any way?

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I was talking kind of recently to a numeri from Spain.

So what happens once they've found people to recruit, the way that Opus Day operates is that, of course, you're expected to kind of whip yourself and do the rest of it and go to mass and confession and the rest, but they also have this additional requirement, which is called, they call the chat.

Sounds nice and friendly, right?

Whenever it sounds that innocent, it's always horrific, right?

And this thing is like, it's meant to be done every week or every two weeks.

And basically a numeri comes out to you and sits with you and you open up your heart and you tell them everything about your life your sex life your professional life whatever that's incredibly awkward to think about and they give you guidance um this yeah this celibate banks this celibate guy that you don't really know kind of giving you guidance about your sex life a 40 year you're older than me celibate man is going to tell me what to do with my sex life oh that was great i'm sure i'm pretty sure that the um the kind of sex life advice is always the same which is like you only have sex to procreate and you should be having as many kids as possible.

So, I mean, that's basically all of the advice they need to give.

I'm starting to think I'm not a good fit for Opus Day, Gareth.

But these, I mean, these chats, chats kind of over the years, have been used to kind of collect information and have been used also to abuse the kind of relationship, the confidence that the member puts into Opus Day.

So, for example, I mean, one of the guys I was talking to recently, a guy from Mexico, was telling me about every time he got back to the center after doing one of these chats, he had to put together this report card.

Now, because they didn't want to have a paper trail, the report card, and this was even in the 2000s, was put together on a typewriter with kind of a carbon copy underneath.

So you're typing out all of these intimate details about this guy you've just sat with, about, I don't know, like trouble he's having at work or like marital problems.

You're typing it all up into a record.

One copy gets kept at the center, put into a safe there or whatever.

And the other copy gets sent to the regional headquarters of Opus Day.

Wow.

So for years, they literally had all of these files with compromising information.

And, you know, they would read this and work out ways of using this information to further their agenda.

I mean, okay, I should, at this stage, disavow people of the notion that there's some guy sat in Rome, the head of Opus Day, issuing orders down to like Leonard Leo or whatever.

That's not the way it works.

The U.S.

Supreme Court.

But yes, that's not the way it works.

The way it works is that they use these chat sessions to gently push people into the right direction.

And often that oversteps the mark.

So they might be told about how to think about a certain political issue and kind of they misuse Catholic teachings to push them in a certain direction.

I've heard stories about senior judges as well, members of Opus Day, being given certain books and articles to read on cases that they're currently kind of sitting on as a way of like pushing them to make the right decision on certain things.

Wow.

So these chats, which is supposedly just meant to be like almost like a therapy session, helping you to be a better Catholic, Opus Day is collecting information and then using that information to work out what buttons it can press to maybe get you to give some more money or to team up with some other members of Opus Day to further this anti-abortion group or agenda or whatever it might be.

I was going to ask about that because, of course, the abortion cases.

Roe v.

Wade in the United States, it's front and center, has been for a while.

And you get these justices on there and it's like, okay, if your whole mantra is by any means necessary and God's okay with our plan and isn't subject to the laws of man, how do we know you're making impartial judgments with respect to something like Roe v.

Wade?

And the answer is you're almost certainly not doing that.

And you're being nudged to do what the church wants, which is completely inappropriate.

And actually not just what the church wants, because I mean, the kind of Catholicism that Opus Day has been pushing has been not the same as what Pope Francis was pushing during his papacy.

And it's too early to talk about Pope Leo, but it's these are are not accepted catholic teachings and this is not what the vatican is pushing this is a very perverted reading of catholicism it's a very conservative reactionary reading of catholicism where they pick bits of the bible to support what is really a kind of ultra conservative agenda it's using scripture to push back on anything progressive and for anything kind of left-leaning and it's a misuse of of religion really it's yeah yeah so is it safe to say that these people are more conservative than the Pope?

Certainly more conservative than the current Pope and the last Pope.

Whether they were more conservative than John Paul II, who was pretty conservative, and Benedict, I'm not sure.

I mean, actually, John Paul II saw Opus Day as a great ally.

Yeah.

He gave them this kind of special status, which effectively allowed them to operate outside of the normal hierarchy of the church.

He saw them as like his special army.

I was going to say, it's like Catholic special forces.

Precisely.

I mean, so when he became Pope in the late 70s, the church, I mean, as as it is today, was kind of deeply divided.

He didn't really know how Rome works properly.

He was worried about bishops in, you know, far-flung places like the States and Latin America who were maybe left-leaning and who weren't listening to his edicts.

And so I think he literally gave Opus Day this special status because he wanted them to be his special forces.

He would dispatch them to certain countries that were causing trouble and say, go do your thing.

And so he would basically kind of subvert and undercut the existing church structure in those countries in order to push his conservative agenda.

Opuste were very happy to do that.

Sure, of course.

Do you think it's going to,

I'm sure it's really hard for you to say, but if they got special status under that previous pope, do you think there's a world in which the current pope is like, hey, by the way, this is ridiculous and a perversion of the religion.

We should probably reel these guys in.

That already started to happen under Francis.

I see.

Opuste's been riddled with accusations of abuse for decades.

Labor trafficking, what else?

Labor trafficking.

I I mean, grooming of children.

It's kind of...

Oh, that's on brand.

I mean, the ranks, the numery ranks, because of all the pressures on them, those ranks are absolutely riddled with mental illness.

And what Opus Day does is it covers that up by heavy use of prescription drugs.

So they have these Opus Day doctors, which prescribe drugs for, you know, a numerary who's having a hard time, is sent to the Opus Day doctor, comes back with this kind of long prescription of drugs they're meant to take.

You know, many of them, I've spoken to people who've come out the other side.

They leave Opus Day and they go and see a proper doctor.

And the doctor is like, why the hell are you on this long list of drugs?

This is doing nothing for you and it's making you worse.

So yeah, there's kind of drug abuse, all kinds of kind of financial fraud and kind of spiritual fraud as well that we're talking about before with the chats.

So in the late 2010s, Pope Francis became aware of some pretty horrendous abuses inside of Opus Day, and he decided to take action.

And

in in 2022, the Pope issued this thing called a motu propio, which is basically a papal decree.

It's like, this is an order coming from the Pope.

And he basically ordered them to get their act in order.

He said, like, you guys, you now have to rip up your statutes and start again.

You've got to kind of basically redraw your constitution because it's fucked up.

He maybe didn't use those words.

Yeah, he might have.

He's talking Spanish, of course.

Sounds nicer.

But he basically put them on notice, so you guys need to clean up.

So So since 2022, Opus Day has basically dragged its feet.

Now, what's interesting about current events is that just before he died on Easter Monday, Pope Francis had been on the cusp of signing into law this huge reform of Opus Day.

So it had all been kind of agreed with the Vatican.

A week later, Opus Day was meant to have this big vote to approve it internally, and then it would get sent back to the Pope.

He'd sign it off and the reforms would be done.

So within hours of the Pope dying, Opus Day cancelled the vote.

They're like, maybe we don't have to do this anymore.

And actually then there was this huge campaign started to lobby about for who was going to be the first one.

I was going to say, what if they probably, if their enemy is no longer in power, maybe they can get their own guy in there.

Well, there was this extraordinary situation as well, where for a time, Pope Francis' body was lying in state in St.

Peter's Cathedral.

Members of the public and the cardinals were all kind of lining up to pay their respects.

This one Opus Day cardinal turns up and is photographed standing over the Pope's dead body, wearing his cardinal robes.

Now, what's interesting about that is that a couple of years earlier, Pope Francis had banned this guy because of all of these sexual abuse allegations.

He'd banned him from wearing his cardinal robes

and banned him from making any public statements.

He then starts to use his time in Rome.

He's lobbying alongside a bunch of other kind of conservative forces within the church for a hardline conservative pope.

They didn't get what they wanted.

That was my next question.

Is Pope Leo a hardline conservative or no?

So with Pope Leo, they clearly didn't get what they wanted.

And what's interesting is that Pope Leo, one of his very first acts, one of his very first audiences, he summoned the head of Opus Day to come and see him and basically demanded an update about worthy reform.

Where were we at with that thing we were supposed to sign on Friday?

Yeah, yeah, you remember that thing?

What thing?

I don't remember.

Oh, really?

Let me refresh your memory.

This is interesting.

I mean, for me, that's a very clear signal.

that this pope um sounds like it's a priority absolutely literally day one his first set of meetings meetings opus day guy is brought in and where are we to clean the mess that you've been making for the last century and there are signals coming from the vatican i've been hearing from sources that you know the messages to victims you aren't going to be disappointed there's going to be some big reforms coming out so i mean we will see wow yeah it's all a bit up in the air are there any specific cases let's say in the united states under the supreme court that you believe were influenced by opus day besides roe v wade i I think the way to think about it, okay, so Opus Day, it's not just the Supreme Court, like Opus Day has spent years inserting itself into the very fabric of Washington, D.C.

in conservative circles.

And so, yeah, a bunch of people will be members of Opus Day,

but I think the best way to think about Opus Day is as a network.

Some people will be members.

Other people just have kind of brushes with members or with the network.

And so it's about creating a culture.

It's about informing that culture and creating kind of an an ecosystem of people like us so that when Trump's looking to appoint the right person to head up, I don't know, Department of Education or whatever it might be, there are a bunch of candidates here who are well-versed in Catholic teachings or in kind of conservative Catholic teachings who can be relied on to push through the right kinds of policies and rulings.

What are the implications of this?

for the future of, let's say, democracy and judicial independence, especially in the United States?

Because Because if there's all these people sort of waiting in the wings and the rest of the folks are highly suggesting that they be appointed to specific positions, the whole Illuminati, you know, the Jews control the world conspiracy that they've been projecting onto Jews, but it's actually happening with them.

Yeah, I mean, there was actually this one priest in D.C., a quite a famous Opus Day priest called

C.J.

McCloskey.

And he didn't mince his words.

He talked about this great battle coming and the potential for war and

how

good Catholics should expect to kind of go into battle with progressives and, you know, there may well be blood or whatever.

Oh, like a real war.

Yeah, like absolutely, like a real war.

And, you know, he

very much kind of advocated for a kind of theocracy because a theocracy, I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's kind of literally you have priests in charge who kind of take messages from God.

And I don't think they quite see that happening, but I think, and we're kind of starting to see this to a certain extent with Trump, it's about having our guys in charge, people who we can trust, people who are like us, who believe the same kinds of things, who have a very similar outlook on Western civilization and what a family should look like and what schooling should look like and what society should look like.

It's more about that than an Illuminati of like a group of guys getting in a room together.

And it's about a culture.

And Opus Day is, they have all of these plans in the US to expand.

I mean, what they've very successfully inserted themselves into the Washington, D.C.

kind of circles.

I mean, one stat I kind of like to talk about is as a Catholic organization, you'd expect the Opus Day membership in the states to be concentrated in predominantly Catholic cities.

So like places like Boston, Chicago, New York.

Miami these days, I guess, with the large Hispanic population.

But the largest Opus Day community in the States is Washington, D.C.

And that's because that's where they focus their recruitment efforts and that because that's where you need to be to influence society.

So having, I guess, cracked the political judicial worlds, the next stage that they see is they really want to crack the education sphere.

So they have these big plans to expand the Opus Day school networks across the country.

They're already present at all of the Ivy League universities, but they have these big plans to, again, expand their presence there to influence the kinds of debates that are happening on campus, to try to kind of shift them, to insert more conservative talking points.

But also they're recruiting tomorrow's elite as well.

They've already got today's elite.

It's about grooming the next generation of leaders to make sure they're also on the same page.

I guess they're not really hidden because you know about it, but it seems like they don't maybe really advertise this particular thing.

I mean, they're recruiting, but they're not necessarily...

advertising how much power that they're trying to exert over specific cultural moments.

This is because

I mean they very much like to keep kind of all of these things at arm's length because it gives them plausible denial of it.

But also what's interesting is what marks Opus Day out from the rest of the church is that for the rest of the Catholic Church, anybody's welcome to join.

Whereas Opus Day is by invitation only.

You can't go onto the Opus Day website, punch in your details and get like a pamphlet in the post or brochure or whatever.

It's exclusive.

It's a club.

You know, they literally choose you as a member.

They decide who they want.

They decide whether that that person's pliable, whether that person will be beneficial to the group, and then you're invited in.

So it's absolutely by invitation only.

Are they true believers, all these people, you think?

Or is it kind of like a power structure like any other?

That's a great question.

I think it depends

how advanced Opus Day is in that country.

I think here in the UK, for example, Opus Day is relatively small.

And I think the people that join it here do it because they're really serious Catholics and they're looking for something Catholicism kind of pro or whatever.

But I think Opus Day in some parts of the world has so successfully inserted itself into society, particularly into kind of the political and business circle.

So in places like Spain, for example, and across Latin America, I think being part of Opus Day and being part of the network can be extremely beneficial to you kind of if you're starting a business, you kind of, you might get a few connections or a few deals through your pals in Opus Day.

It very much works like that in Spain.

Sort of like Scientology.

I mean, I don't know that many other cults, so I'm constantly harping on this.

But yeah, a lot of people, they join when they want to become an actor because it's like, oh, well, all the producers in this town are in there.

Not all, but many.

And the casting people are in here and they're kind of going to pick you over other people if you join.

And you're like, oh, that's kind of a club.

And it's got the self-help element.

And then after you're in it for a while, you're like, oh, aliens, huh?

You know, or whatever the next few levels of this thing are.

And it sort of sounds like that.

Like, yeah, I'm Catholic.

I'll go a little hardcore.

Why not?

It's kind of cool.

I'm into it already.

Look, I got promoted at the bank because one of the directors is Opus Day.

And I kind of came to him for some career advice.

And look, I'm on the partner track now or whatever.

And then it's like, nah, you're in the club.

You don't want to relinquish that for no good reason.

I see Opus Day, in my mind, it's a kind of politicized club.

It's kind of like a boys' club, although women are admitted as well.

But with this kind of weird veil of spirituality, which does a couple of things.

I mean, it kind of, it means that people who are considering joining kind of drop their guard guard because they're like, oh, it's just part of the Catholic Church.

It's pretty fine.

But that spirituality element is also used to control people.

It's also used, I think, especially in the world of politics as a way of like, you've got a priest patting you on the back saying, oh, yeah, your ultra right-wing view on this.

It's kind of justified in the Bible.

So it's kind of fine.

It's kind of, it's almost like a reassurance kind of thing.

So it's, yeah, so it serves a bunch of purposes.

But yeah, I mean, I'm under, no doubt, it's kind of a deeply reactionary political network that uses this kind of veil of spirituality basically to entice people in and to keep them in.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Gareth Gore.

So Dan Brown writes the Da Vinci code.

Did this cause ruckus inside Opus Day?

Because no group wants their thing fictionalized to be like a massive hit and make them look crazy and psycho.

I remember during the kind of research for the book, I spent some time in New York and I spoke to the guy there, the Opus Day spokesperson who discovered that whole thing.

Part of his job was to kind of read Publishers Weekly, which for those people who aren't into the publishing world is basically an industry magazine, which tells you like the latest titles that are about to be launched or whatever.

And he was kind of flicking through this, kind of on the lookout for anything that might be about Opus Day.

And he just comes across this crazy novel by this guy called Dan Brown, who'd had a couple of like minor hits before this, but he wasn't really well known at this stage.

This is like 2003 or whatever.

And he finds out that this book basically, one of the main characters is an Opus Day Numery, an Albino monk there are no albino monk i forgot about that yeah right right right who goes around killing people to keep churches secret secret and yeah so obviously all of that kind of bit is like made up or whatever

but i think at first they were like really like

we're kind of going to be a kind of a group of that's ridiculed or whatever but they i think they very quickly realized that they could turn it to their advantage we're so famous we got parodied by this hit novel look tom hanks is in this movie with about us and so they ran with it so they basically inserted themselves into the news cycle as like, hey, you want, you've heard about the Da Vinci Code.

Now come meet the real,

the real Opus Day, which is this kind of highly polished public relations side of organization.

They don't tell you about the human trafficking or the drugging or the grooming of children.

They kept that secret.

But they told me that basically it was a turning point for them in the States.

Suddenly they had a lot more members because people were like, ah.

They very successfully inserted this highly polished image of Opus Day into the media.

And so, you know, you had pieces in like Time magazine, the New York Times that were talking about the real Opus Day, which was anything but I suppose they also would attract people who go, oh, I'm cool being a little bit evil and justifying it with religion.

So they probably get the contingent of those people as well who are kind of like, I have no qualms abusing power.

Where do I get some?

There is that.

There is that.

And actually, I,

you know, I get a lot of trolls on social media.

Yeah.

I can imagine.

There are a lot of people that fall into that category of like, I'm going to support these guys because they're the the bad guys.

Right.

And because, yeah.

Why not?

Yeah.

I was going to ask if you feel like you've maybe got a little bit of a target on your back exposing this or have you faced any resistance or danger in exposing this?

Because a lot of times these groups don't love it when investigative journalists go through their archives and find a bunch of dirt.

Yeah, I mean, it was kind of odd because the Opus Day were helpful, but not helpful through the process.

Surprise, surprise.

Yeah.

Because they were like, oh, we're totally transparent.

We've got nothing to hide.

And I was like, great.

Show me that.

Let's go with this.

Yeah.

We're not that transparent.

So, yeah, to their credit, you know, they arranged many interviews for me.

They invited me into a bunch of their centers.

I didn't just take their word for it.

I also like did my homework and I met, you know, I arranged my own interviews, met former members, did a huge amount of digging in the archives, whatever.

But to answer your question about do I, I mean, it's kind of been a weird experience.

I mean, I fell into this story by accident.

So I didn't set out to write something about Helpers Day.

So I think they've kind of struggled a bit with that element because it's kind of easy if someone comes and writes a book who has an agenda.

Then you get the albino monk after you.

Well, yeah, or someone who's like for maybe like a disgruntled former member who writes a book.

It's kind of easy to dismiss that.

Yeah.

But because I fell into it by accident, but they've tried.

I mean, like before the book came out, we had a few difficult months where Opus Day hired.

an extremely expensive and extremely aggressive defamation firm.

Especially in the UK, that's tough, right?

Yeah, well, actually, this was in the US.

Oh, it was.

Because I know in the UK, defamation is so much easier to harass people.

Yes.

Yes.

I think, but because the main publisher was American, Simon Chester.

I see, really.

They kind of, you know, they came after us there.

And they sent a lot of kind of aggressive letters, basically.

I mean, I think the intention was to make Simon and Chester think twice about publishing this.

But crap, he cashed his advance check.

So we kind of have to.

I think they were like trying to send the message, you know, like, you know, maybe you've paid this guy in advance but hey there could be a lot more trouble and why don't you just kind of like quietly make this book go away yeah but to simon just as credit they stood by me the whole way yeah that's impressive you know like it's it's really impressive and you know i i thank them and my you know hats off to them but that wasn't the end of the kind of campaign you know before the book even came out before they'd even had a chance to read a page of the book they issued all of these statements saying it was all conspiracy theories it's all lies i mean like how can you say something is lies if you don't even know what what's written what's written in there like it's that's true and then um we're gonna assume it's all lies yeah and once the book came out they launched this whole kind of disinformation campaign they tried to do this whole character assassination i've had all this kind of army of trolls online trying to take me down and i'm waiting for the emails that say like oh he took you for a ride everything he said was false yeah have this other guy on and hear the truth i get that every time i do something like this here's another guy he'll show you the truth and you look the guy up and it's going to be like a guy who's a lifelong priest from the spanish church lives in Texas now.

It's going to be somebody like that.

Absolutely.

I mean, I think the most interesting thing for me is that most normal organizations, when confronted with like super serious allegations of like human trafficking, grooming of kids, drugging your own members, spiritual abuse, breaking the seal of confession, they would come out and they would say, These are really serious allegations.

We are going to take them very seriously.

We're going to investigate them, get to the bottom of them.

And if anyone needs to be brought to justice, we'll ensure that's done.

Opus Day's response has been stick its fingers in its ears and go, la la la la la la la la la.

This guy's a liar.

This guy's a liar.

And I think that's really quite telling.

This is an organization that has zero intentions of addressing its failures and addressing abuse inside of its ranks.

Because the founder said the vision for Opus Day came from God, and because the founder wrote this vision down in meticulous amounts of detail, To challenge anything that the founder wrote down is to challenge the whole foundation that this group is built upon, is to challenge this notion that it's an idea from God.

And so they're trapped.

They can't question anything about the way it runs because that's kind of what the founder said.

And the founder said it came from God.

So how can we challenge God?

So they've kind of got themselves into this kind of vicious circle, I think.

Were there any specific moments during your investigation that really shocked or deeply disturbed you?

I mean, again, it's going to be hard to pick one with the labor trafficking and all this stuff, but anything stand out?

I went out to Argentina to meet, there's a group of 42 women there who were recruited as kids and basically enslaved by Oprah's Day.

And, you know, meeting with many of those women, hearing their stories was just absolutely horrendous.

I mean, can you imagine?

I mean, I've got three daughters.

Two of them are that age where these girls, you know, and it's just to think of these poor kids being enticed with this kind of carrot of a better life and then ending up being kind of led.

into this horrendous life of servitude.

I mean, they were literally working 14 hours a day for no pay, 365 days a year.

They were not allowed to go out onto the street on their own unaccompanied.

I mean, it's like the handmaid's tale.

It really sounds like it.

In real life.

One of the most uncomfortable moments was, you know, Opus Day said it didn't have anything to hide.

And so I said, look, I'd love to come into one of these schools that still exists in Argentina these days.

And I said, look, here's a school I found.

I know it was directly financed by the bank.

So there's a direct link to what I'm investigating.

And they're like, ah, but it's all fine.

All the girls are happy there.

I was like, well, fine.

Let me come in.

Let me talk to somebody.

And this went on for days.

So like whilst it on, I'm like, look, I've got, I'm leaving tomorrow.

If I don't speak to them tomorrow, then that's it.

And they're like, oh, well, we'll try, we'll try.

And then I get a call like in a few hours before I'm leaving.

I'm afraid they've had a vote.

inside the school and the girls have voted that they don't want to speak to you.

These people who are enslaved and have no, aren't allowed to go out on their own have voted to not allow anyone to win.

They've voted, no, they said they don't want you in because because then they might be uncomfortable having a guy around and journalist but they've nominated two people to come and be kind of spokespeople for the group you know they'll meet you at the upper state office or whatever so i was like okay well it's not ideal because i kind of you know but fine and so i went off and had coffee with these two young women and i was like yeah so i heard that there was you guys had a vote and they were like what are you talking about and so i'm like you know it's just so many moments

didn't even get the lie straight forgot to brief them on the bullshit that they gave you on the phone call my gosh so many moments like that where, you know, they feed you what sounds like a plausible excuse or explanation or lie.

And then you dig into it and you find out it's just all horseshit.

Like well-orchestrated horseshit.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Hey, when you go there, he's going to ask about the vote.

We told him we all voted and that you're the spokespeople.

They just show up totally unprepared.

Yeah.

It's so, it's comically ridiculous.

I think the thing where, you know, basically I was asking about what had happened at the Vatican with Pope Francis and this clampdown.

And, you know, this one senior guy in El Paste was telling me how it it was all nonsense.

I, you know, what really happened was this.

And then the more I dug into the story and the more I asked him, like, well, how can you say that?

How do you know this?

And it became apparent that he was just making the whole thing up.

Yeah, sure.

But I think the reason they've got away with it for so long is because it's complicated.

Journalists.

don't have a huge amount of time.

You know, they're under pressure to kind of get the next story.

Generally, yeah.

And so it's been, I think, quite easy for them over the years to brush people off with kind of these explanations about whatever.

And I only fell into this by accident.

If the bank hadn't collapsed, then much of this story might have remained untold.

I think so.

What's this about hiring retired FBI agents to investigate people?

Do you want to comment on that?

Yes.

I mean, so that was, so, I mean, a lot of people inside Opus Day have been unhappy about Pope Francis and the way he was pushing the church in a slightly more progressive direction.

And so they had this campaign going, kind of thinking, well, this papacy is kind of lost, but we can try to make sure the next guy is one of us.

And so they started this this campaign and they hired a bunch of former FBI agents, former CIA agents to collect dirt on potential candidates for the next pope.

And they did this in the end.

So when

ahead of the conclave that has just happened, they published this website and published this book with all of this kind of dossier inside on each of the potential candidates.

The idea being that they were going to smear a few of them and try to get one of their guys elected.

It failed.

Wow.

I'm sure that why it failed is probably a whole separate book, but it's interesting because you would think that if there's an actual real-life conspiracy going on inside the church with all these levers of power, they probably had a pretty good chance of getting their own guy in.

And there's other people who were not interested in that.

Yeah, I mean, the conclave is literally like 130 guys who get to vote in secret.

And so I guess kind of trying to push that election one way or another, no one will ever know how many votes Pope Leo Gaut or whatever.

Yeah, it could have been close.

Yeah, I mean, like, so, yeah, I mean, there was every chance they might get their guy in.

And, you know, leaking the right information, he's not linked to Opuste as far as I know, but this,

the nominated ambassador to the Vatican, this guy called Brian Birch, he's linked to a website that put out this crazy story about one of the leading candidates for pope just hours before the conclave about how this guy had collapsed and all these ambulances had to be brought.

I mean, clearly, and they had to, they pulled the story in the end.

I mean, it was part of this wider campaign to smear the liberal progressive candidates with the hope of getting a more conservative pope.

So what do you think Opus Day's goals are now?

I mean, back in the day, it was re-Christianize the whole world.

Do you think they're maybe shifting it up a little bit?

Or are they still kind of like, no, we want the whole world to be re-Christianized?

I think Opus Day right now is purely focused on survival.

It's pretty clear that Francis wanted to bring them down or to, you know, push them to massively clean up.

It looks like Leo wants to go the the same way so i think right now it's about trying to save as much of it as they can i'm sure there are a bunch of diehards inside opa's day that are like whatever the pub does a bunch of us will carry on this is an organization that has hundreds of kind of shell companies around the world they have assets in the billions in the us alone i totted up something like a hundred non-profits that are linked to Opus Day.

Really?

So this is almost like a parallel Vatican in some ways.

Yeah, absolutely.

And in fact, after Pope Francis began to clamp down, they started to sell off some of the properties.

You know, they had this Tiffany mansion in Boston.

They had this 16th century castle on the banks of Lake Como in Italy.

Wow.

You know, they start selling this stuff off.

Why?

I think it's to have liquidity and

to have money.

in the right places just in case Oprah Day is closed down because these non-profits officially have nothing to do with Opus Day.

So even if Oprah Day is closed down, they'll continue to kind of exist.

And I think it's a way of restarting the project in another name.

So I think there's still this kind of diehard core who, no matter what happens with the Vatican, even if the Vatican closes it down, they'll still seek to kind of further the agenda.

They'll seek to carry out God's work and the teachings of the founder, José Maria Escriva, no matter what.

I am so curious what my Christian and especially my Catholic listeners think of this.

I'm sure that somebody who's listening listening to this is in opus day and is going to be like yeah this guy's got it all wrong because i've whenever i talk about scientology i get emails from people who are in scientology i don't know how high ranking they are but they're like you got it wrong it's like a self-help thing blah blah blah but then you talk to i don't know leah reminis or somebody who's high up in scientology and they're like no this is it's crazy i think this is a good moment actually to say that i think the vast majority of opus day members are probably good people yeah they're just really hardcore catholics who don't have a clue what's going on like they don't have a clue about this human trafficking and the way that you know certain members are being drugged and all all of these abuses going on.

I think they would be absolutely horrified to find out what is going on inside the organization.

I mean, obviously, I want them to read my book.

Go read my book.

You'd have to buy it, go and get it from the library if you want to.

No one ever was going to be able to do it.

Buy it, but maybe hide it over your couch dog.

Yes.

Or, you know, like I'm on Twitter and feel, you know, if you want to DM me, I'm happy to enter into conversation or whatever.

But I haven't made this stuff up.

There are several other places you can go.

I mean, in the 90s in the US, there was a website set up by former members called the Opus Day Awareness Network.

It's kind of fallen into disuse.

There's a Spanish language kind of community called Opus Libros.

On Reddit, there's an Opus Day community these days, an Opus Day Exposed community.

There are lots of former members out there.

So I, you know, if you are a member of Opus Day or you don't believe me for what, you know, you think this guy's got skin in the game, he just wants to sell his book.

go speak to these other people and like find out what's really going on.

There's an excellent documentary on hbo max which came out recently called how i left opus day which is the i think it's 13 women former members of opus day some of them are these numery servants from all over the world you know it's not just argentina or spain or whatever they're from all over the world who talk about their experience it's not just me saying this this is uh yeah this is a widespread problem yeah it's so so interesting in your opinion what is the best way for the public at large to remain vigilant against these kinds of sort of hidden influences or groups or is it just more like be aware that if you're joining a hardcore religious organization that maybe there's a shady side to it I don't know what do you think my advice with opaque day would be to steer clear you can't stay far enough away from this organization because once it gets its clutches into you it will really rip you apart and and take advantage of you you completely I mean my opinions on I'm not religious myself but I mean my opinions on Catholicism and religion more generally are like if that rocks you below does something for you religion can be a very positive thing fine but Opus Day is not a positive thing and in my opinion should be completely eradicated what do you think can be done to safeguard institutions like for example the Supreme Court or just the judicial branch in general what can we do to safeguard them from external manipulation by groups like Opus Day I don't know and I kind of hesitate as non-American giving you guys advice about what what to do I think that the maybe you should rethink that position I think we can use a little external well you know we tried to give you our advice like 200 years ago or whatever yeah we weren't good

Didn't take that well.

But I mean, it's kind of odd for me as a Brit, looking at the way the judiciary works in the US.

Over here, being a judge is like being a doctor.

It's not a politicized position.

You don't get kind of Democrat doctors and Republican doctors.

So why should you have that in the judiciary?

Just kind of seems very odd.

That's a really good point.

Like, I mean, certainly here, so like judges appoint each other and it's kind of seen as a professional guild almost.

They're not political appointees.

There are no elections or whatever.

And when I look across the pond and see how things are done there and how it's so politicized and how your stance on certain issues can mean the difference between you getting a position on the bench or not, I find that extraordinary.

Extraordinary is a good place to worry, I'm sure.

I mean, especially since the judiciary is meant to be kind of the third pillar.

Yeah, that's the point.

You have the executive and you have the legislator.

And this is meant to be a different thing that's kind of removed from those other two right legs of government but clearly it's not because you know you have people who are the republican president is appointing republican judges who are approved by republican senate and it just seems very strange and the uk judiciary is not perfect either but yeah what's with the wigs that's my question well you know what as a guy with

you could use one yeah sure i could use a word yeah maybe i'm in the wrong job that's right that's right.

Go to law school and you can pick up a wig.

Gareth, thank you so much, man.

Really interesting.

We'll link to the book, of course, in the show notes.

I appreciate you coming on.

Glad we were finally able to do it.

Thanks, Jordan, for having me on.

Been a pleasure.

Join us as Adam Gamal, a Muslim Arab-American and former Egyptian refugee, recounts his rise to become a key operative of one of the U.S.'s most secretive military units in this two-part podcast series.

In part one, Adam delves into the high-stakes world of counterterrorism and covert operations, revealing the personal and ethical complexities of fighting terrorism from within the shadows.

I came to the U.S.

to give me the right to dream.

In Egypt you didn't have that option.

It's not cliche I'm not trying to recruit people to join the army but I was like here is a key actually to be as American as anybody can argue with you and it was joining the military.

You end up there by pure determination, by having grit and by being a bit lucky.

So we were basically getting our tasks from Secretary of Defense level.

Join Special Operation Command in charge of three main missions.

Counter-narcotic, counter-terrorism, and hostage rescue.

I believe myself, if my dad did not push me towards getting the right education, then maybe I would have gone in the wrong direction.

So education is gonna help people prosper.

They're gonna help people actually critically analyze the information they are receiving.

So when somebody's bullshitting them, about, hey, if you go to the bathroom with your right foot, not your left foot, you're going to hell.

If you have an educated person gonna look at him and say, you know what, man, this doesn't make any sense and then i believe to educating women is crucial because they are raising us a lot of people spend more time with their moms than with their dad because they nurture us and they do all of these things so if we have a population of educated women in the middle eastern and any of these countries i think these countries will prosper and it would be harder to convince these guys to become terrorists business is war and business is good when we give people the proper education we all live a better

Tune in to uncover his unique journey and critical insights only he can provide on episode 978 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

All things Gareth Gore will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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