Roland Joffé: There isn’t an Opus Dei party line

By Stephen Greynadu in National Catholic Register

Roland Joffé, director of The Mission and There Be Dragons, calls himself an agnostic, but he seems to be a remarkably God-haunted one.

At a recent press event in Spain, the British writer-director reflected on what drew him to There Be Dragons — a film set during the Spanish Civil War that has predictably elicited media controversy for its positive treatment of St. Josemaria Escrivá, played by Charlie Cox, and Opus Dei, the personal prelature he founded. There Be Dragons recently opened in Spain; the film comes to the United States in May.

“I have no idea whether there’s a God or not, and it seemed to be a fascinating thing to think about,” Joffé explained to a roomful of sometimes skeptical journalists at Madrid’s Villa Magna Hotel. “I’m not a very spiritual person, unfortunately, being a Brit. We tend to go for humor over religion.”

The self-fulfilling humor of the self-deprecating line notwithstanding, the filmmaker easily uses the language of sainthood, spirituality and grace. His British penchant for humor resurfaced as he recounted the reactions of some of his friends to the news that he was doing a film dealing with Opus Dei. “Oh my God, that’s a fascist organization!” was one horrified response he related. “I mean, they slaughtered hundreds of people!”

Joffé’s deadpan rejoinder — “They have? Really? How do you know that?” — was followed by a litany of similarly preposterous charges: that Opus Dei “controls” the Church; that “hundreds” of cardinals and “thousands” of bishops are members; that their membership is kept secret, and so on.

Provocatively tweaking dubious members of his audience, Joffé continued, “The fact is: Opus Dei itself doesn’t really exist. I hate to break this to you, but there isn’t really such a thing as Opus Dei — in the sense of some kind of society with an opinion about something.

“I investigated Opus Dei, and I began to find a very important thing: Opus Dei is a group of people who come together to work on their spiritual life, to work on their relationship to God. But Opus Dei does not have a point of view, other than to say that what you believe you must stand up for — and you must take responsibility for your choices.”

“Beyond that, Opus Dei does not tell people what to think,” he said. “And, in some sense, that’s very beautiful. It’s also shocking to a culture that’s used to large political and ideological groups. Here you have a group that shares some things, but not everything. It’s very difficult to understand. We know that when you belong to a party, most of the time, you’re being told to toe the party line, in one way or another. There isn’t an Opus Dei party line.”

“That means that some people will not like the conservative members of Opus Dei that they meet, or they may not like the liberal members of Opus Dei that they meet,” Joffé said. “But I can assure you that all those sorts of opinions do exist inside Opus Dei.”

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