Opus Dei, a lay organisation, is what's known as a 'personal prelature' of the Pope. Its founder, Josemaría Escrivá, has been proclaimed a saint. Undoubtedly many sincere Catholics are drawn to its stated mission of ‘promoting among Christians of all social classes a life fully consistent with their faith, in the middle of the ordinary circumstances of their lives and especially through the sanctification of their work.’

    Michele Somerville theologian and author has written for several years about the unsavoury and corrupt heart of this organisation, it’s ‘accumulation and capture of wealth’, it’s connections to neo-fascist politics and ‘the boiling frog style’ buying up of the RC church in the United States. Recently she drew our attention to Opus Dei’s role in the cause for the canonisation of Carlo Acutis.

   Anne-Marie Allen has experienced Opus Dei from the inside, an experience from which she says she is still recovering. The Financial Times (UK) highlighted her and other’s experiences in the lower ranks of OD, reserved only for women, of what she describes as ‘behaviour control’ from was a form of ‘behaviour control from ‘an ambitious and tyrannical institution that demanded perfection, humiliation and pain.’

Anne-Marie's story must be told; it is not an easy listen but shining through it is the courage and risks taken by Anne-Marie and others like her in fleeing from a life of enforced servitude. A life that was as far removed as possible from what the OD website describes as ‘a specific call… to be the “hands” uniting the most divine with what is most human’.