You want to be a martyr. I'll place a martyrdom within your reach: to be an apostle and not call yourself an apostle, to be a missionary—with a mission—and not call yourself a missionary, to be a man of God and to seem a man of the world: to pass unnoticed.
—The Way
The Way is surely one of the world's most extraordinary bestsellers. Written in 1933 by a Spanish priest named Jose-maria Escrivá, it consists of 999 aphorisms (sample: "Be firm! Be strong! Be a man! And then—be an angel!") that come so close to Dale Carnegie's exhortations that it might well be called How to Win Friends and Influence God. Yet The Way has sold more than 2,000,000 copies in 15 languages, including Tagalog and Swahili, and is now being translated into 15 other tongues. It is the only written credo of a rapidly expanding but widely misunderstood religious organization known as the Sacerdotal Society of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei.
Opus Dei, as it is commonly called, is a loosely knit organization of laymen and priests that Escrivá founded less than four decades ago in Madrid. Despite his counsel to "pass unnoticed," it has become the most controversial —and in many ways the most powerful —Spanish ecclesiastical invention since the Jesuits. Many Spaniards call it "Octopus Dei," and in Argentina it is widely believed to be a "holy mafia." Many Jesuits, in particular, consider it heretical in both concept and practice—a sort of Catholic freemasonry. Spain's Diplomat-Journalist Ismael Herráiz charges that Opus Dei already "controls the organisms that control Spanish economic policy and is in a hurry to appropriate the instruments of social policy." In Spain, rival factions within the Franco regime as well as its illegal democratic opposition both consider Opus Dei the principal threat to their ambitions because of the large number of members in government.
Privy Council. Franco appears to have submitted practically all of Spain's economy to the hands of Opus Dei. Development Planning Minister Laureano López Rodó, Minister of Commerce Faustino Garcia-Monco, Minister of Industry Gregorio López Bravo, Central Bank Governor Mariano Navarro Rubio and Ambassador to the Common Market Alberto Ullástres are all members. Spain's sixth largest private bank (Banco Popular Espaňol) is owned almost solely by Opus Dei members, and they reportedly control 13 other banks and insurance companies, 16 real estate and construction firms and an industrial empire that includes five chemical plants.
Two Madrid newspapers are owned and edited by Opus Deites, and so are a dozen Spanish magazine and book-publishing houses and the nation's leading independent news service. Three Opus Dei members sit on the privy council of Don Juan de Borbón y Battenberg, the pretender to the Spanish throne, and an Opus Dei priest serves as confessor to Prince Juan Carlos, who is next in line. Moreover, the country's only private university, the Pamplona-based Universidad de Navarra, is an out-and-out Opus Dei institution, and Opus Dei professors are being hired with increasing frequency for chairs in state universities.