The pet club of the late Pope John Paul II and the current Pope  Benedict XVI, Opus Dei, has gone through a rough week. First the  release of the film Da Vinci Code, which, granted, is fiction but  which integrates some of the realities of Opus Dei including its  penchant for housing strange characters and fostering body-beating  ascetic spiritual techniques all in an effort to render fascism  fashionable, and allow its members to circulate unencumbered in  powerful places of European politics, economics and religion (to say  nothing of American media and governmental hot spots).

Opus Dei is the club, remember, that the current and past papacy has  substituted for base communities and liberation theology in Latin  American. The latter had as its motto, a “preferential option for the  poor.”  Opus Dei might have as its motto, “a preferential option for  the rich and powerful.” Opus Dei is a club that has infiltrated the  American CIA, FBI, Supreme Court, media and now the bishopry, where  four dioceses in the United States (most recently that of Kansas  City) are now headed by Opus Dei bishops just as numerous dioceses in  Latin America are so ‘”ed.” (The greatest spy in American history,  FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who got more American agents and double  agents murdered than anyone is U.S. history, was a practicing Opus  Dei member who hid for years in the FBI when it was headed by—you  guessed it!—an Opus Dei chief.)

A second embarrassment for Opus Dei this week was the following  headline: “Italian Opus Dei Banker Savagely Murdered.” Gianmario  Roveraro, coming home from an Opus Dei meeting in Italy, was  kidnapped, murdered and chopped into pieces about 30 km from Parma.  Opus Dei's biggest concern is secrecy and this unfortunate happening,  like the movie Da Vinci Code, has shed some unwanted light on the  organization.

Turns out that seventy-year-old Roveraro has been implicated in  Europe's largest corporate scandal regarding the collapse and  fraudulent bankruptcy of the food and dairy conglomerate, Parmalat,  which went out in 2003 with a debt of 23.6 billion dollars—the  largest European corporate failure in history. Said one Italian news  magazine, the case involved “rivers of money, opaque interests and  shady figures.” Smells like the Opus Dei I know.

When I was in Frankfurt a few years ago I had tea downtown with a  journalist.  He said to me, “See all those new skyscrapers  surrounding us here? They are all financial headquarters since the  center of European banking is moving from Switzerland to Frankfurt  because of the Euro. At the top of each of those skyscrapers is…Opus  Dei.”

The third bit of bad news for poor old Opus Dei is the Mel Gibson “I  am drunk…with anti-Semitism” case. Here is a self-proclaimed  theologian and poster boy for Opus Dei, having served up the  sadistic, fascistic, bloody, gory, anti-Semitic pseudo-religious film  The Passion of the Christ (see my review on my web page,  www.matthewfox.org) that is a veritable parody of Jesus' teachings  (Gibson's PR kit mailed to all Christian parishes in the country led  with bold headlines: “Dying was Jesus' reason for Living"), and now  informing all who would listen to his drunken tirade that “all wars  are caused by the Jews.”

Why are people so surprised at the ugly words that came out of the  mouth of drunken Gibson? Given his fascist political leanings and his  religious yearnings for a godly punitive Father, and his membership  in Opus Dei, whose founder (rushed into canonization in record time  by the last and present pope) actually praised Hitler, why were  people so thoroughly shocked?

The trouble is, many investigating units in the media are themselves  riddled with Opus Dei influence. Check out Chris Matthews' so-called  “Hardball” program on CNN, which ran a cuddly one-hour show on a  sweet Roman Catholic Opus Dei couple just a week after yielding to  Opus Dei pressure to cancel a theologian who was promised thirty  minutes of interview time on his program to provide an alternative  view of Pope Ratzinger. Is it time that someone investigated Chris  Matthews' love of right wing Catholicism?  The least he can do is  rename his program from “Hardball” to “No Balls.”

And what about the Supreme Court judges who are Opus Dei? Is the  number two? Or three? Or four? Won't someone please investigate?  (Come to think of it, isn't that the job of our senators who are  supposed to examine Supreme Court candidates?) And what about the  senator from Kansas, Sam Brownback, the cheerleader for a theocratic  America, who is an out-of-the-closet convert to Opus Dei  Catholicism?  He deserves some attention also.

Yes, with Opus Dei bankers being murdered and chopped up; with Opus  Dei Hollywood producers (I wonder who got the largess of Gibson's  $600 million in profits from his pseudo-Christian film) drunk and  spouting deeply held anti-Semitic epitaphs; with exposes on Opus Dei  bishops like that of Kansas City (the first thing he did was to fire  every church worker in the diocese's office—and then swear that his  seminarians would all go to the right wing so-called Catholic Ave  Maria college put up by right wing owner of Domino's pizza in a  strange Florida town where everyone must be a right wing Catholic);  with Opus Dei senators preaching a theocratic America; and with the  film Da Vinci Code beginning to tell some of the secrets of this  silly but dangerous and powerful club, this has not been a good  season for Opus Dei. Its covers are being blown open. The secrets are  seeping out.

But when you have the amount of money they have and the amount of  “friends” in high, high places (like the Vatican and the Supreme  Court and mainline media as starters), it's hard to count them out.  Better to stay alert and ring bells of warning when you see them coming.

Yes, and let's all pray for Mel Gibson's conversion. Then maybe some  of his $600 million ill gotten gains from sick religious filming will  go to authentically spiritual causes…one can hope, right?

Matthew Fox is president of Wisdom University in Oakland, California.  He is the author of twenty-six books.