Journalist Gareth Gore is flummoxed: Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is not only friends with other Catholics in Washington, D.C., but his friends receive spiritual direction from priests.
Gore is trying to sell copies of his new book, Opus, about the Catholic group Opus Dei.
“So, what are the ties between JD Vance and the Opus Dei network that has penetrated Washington, DC over the past few years?” Gore wrote on X recently.
According to Gore’s research, former President Donald Trump’s running mate is “close to Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025.”
Roberts, who, like Vance, is Catholic, “gets his spiritual direction from the Opus Dei hub in DC and last year praised its controversial founder in a speech,” referring to the Catholic Information Center and canonized Saint Josemaria Escriva.
Nothing here is controversial: It sounds like two Catholic conservatives in D.C. know each other. It makes me wonder if Gore knows The Da Vinci Code is a fictional movie and that Opus Dei has no monks. It is a group of lay people and priests affiliated with the Catholic Church.
The rest of Gore’s thread is guilt by association; leaders in Opus Dei have been accused in Argentina of being involved in sex trafficking. Certainly, anyone who is involved in that should be punished if guilty, but it does not follow that everyone associated with Opus Dei is bad.
Gore should be careful about embracing this standard of guilt since he has been published by Bloomberg. That publication, through its founder Michael Bloomberg, has been accused of allowing “a culture of sexual harassment and degradation,” according to the Washington Post.
The second part of Gore’s research is that Opus Dei is close to another conservative Catholic, Leonard Leo.
Leo “orchestrated the conservative takeover of the US Supreme Court,” Gore wrote in a preview of his book for Financial Review. Project 2025, which Leo is involved with, opposes “reproductive rights and same-sex marriage,” according to Gore.
This may be hard for the author to hear, but Catholics are allowed to have political beliefs. And we are allowed to use our money and time to push for the sanctity of life and the protection of biblical marriage.
What Gore appears upset about is that Leo has been successful in pushing for his agenda. Or that a Catholic group worked with Leo to push for the confirmation of conservative Supreme Court justices.
Even taking everything the author said as true and giving all the power to Opus Dei that he thinks it has, there is nothing wrong here. Catholic laity and a Catholic group that includes some priests worked together to advance religious freedom, the dignity of life, and marriage.
The book’s author should be careful about hyping up secrecy as being deviant, since, according to Opus Dei, Gore was not entirely truthful when he reached out for research assistance. The religious group said “the book is littered with twisted facts, errors, conspiracy theories and even outright lies, making false accusations on the basis of biased and misread sources.”
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Gore said I should read the book in response to me sharing my own story about being “brainwashed” by Opus Dei. Jeremiah Poff and I went to the Catholic Information Center in D.C. for Mass this summer and stayed afterward for coffee and donuts.
I may read the book, but if it’s anything like the Charlie Kelly-type conspiracies Gore has put forward so far, I think I will pass and read something else instead. It has been a while since I have read Josemaria Escriva’s book, The Way.
Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix, which received a grant from the Heritage Foundation for an unrelated project. He previously worked for Students for Life of America, where Leonard Leo is a board member.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
