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The Work of God: an Ethnography of Opus Dei

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The Work of God: an Ethnography of Opus Dei THE WORK OF GOD: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF OPUS DEI Przemysław Pi ątkowski A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management Studies Department of Accounting, Finance & Management University of Essex July 2009 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is (...). Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets No evil shall befall you, no affliction come near your tent. For God commands the angels to guard you in all your ways. With their hands they shall support you, lest you strike your foot against a stone. Psalm 91:10-12 I would like to thank all those who guarded me on my way. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family: my mother Maria, my father Stanisław, my sisters Zofia and Joanna, my grandmother Janina, my brothers: Rafał (cousin) and Jarosław (in-law), and, of course, my three lovely little nieces: Maria, Jadwiga, and Janina. I would like to thank my supervisors, Heather Höpfl and Monika Kostera, but I honestly don’t know how. Each in her very distinctive ways, you have opened up new worlds in front of me. You also let me into your lives and entered mine. It simply cannot stop here, I sincerely hope that we will stay in these relations “until death do us apart” and later. My gratitude also goes to Olga Belova, my second supervisor, and all the colleagues in the Essex Management Centre. It has been a privilege to be even a modest part of such an outstanding academic community. What can I say? To you, and to all my friends in Warsaw, Essex and scattered around the world, I promise to guard you on your ways too. There is no way I can repay you, but one has to learn to live with such a debt. Freely I received, freely I will give to others too, thinking of you. 3 SUMMARY The thesis examines the work of Opus Dei, a personal prelature within the Roman Catholic Church. In particular it focuses on the very specific ways in which Opus Dei organizes the symbolic reality for its members, mainly through defining and interpreting the “meaning of work”. The thesis draws upon extensive empirical material in order to explore the ways in which such definitions create meaning in the lives of Opus Dei members. The approach which has been adopted is in the ethnographic tradition. Since the subject of enquiry is a religious organization, parallels are made between ethnography and exegesis, more specifically to patristic (as opposed to scholastic) method of enquiry. The thesis uses a number of stylistic devices in order to communicate both the evolution and the development of the organization and also, and perhaps more explicitly, to explain the epistemological journey of the researcher. In consequence, there are two emergent concerns which both locate the thesis and provide the primary contribution to knowledge. These are the ethnographic work itself which offers unique insights into an organization still relatively little researched (at least from certain perspectives) and for which access is limited. The second, and arguably more significant, is the method of inquiry which refers to a tradition which deserves further attention. A more complete explanation of these issues is given below. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS: FOREWORD 5 OVERVIEW 14 I.OPUS DEI 14 II.METHODOLOGY 35 PART I: THE DOGMA 57 GENESIS OF OPUS DEI 58 THE MESSAGE 78 PSALM 105 ANALYSIS OF THE DOGMA 114 PART II: EMPIRIA 127 BOOK OF PERSIS 127 BOOK OF JULIA 134 BOOK OF TRYPHAENA 144 BOOK OF EPAENETUS 154 BOOK OF PRISCA AND AQUILA 167 BOOK OF PHOEBE 185 BOOK OF GAIUS 193 ANALYSIS OF EMPIRIA 200 BIBLIOGRAPHY: 219 5 FOREWORD This research project took well over six years of my life all together. It started sometime in 2002, when, guided by Professor Monika Kostera, we were asked to choose an organization as a subject of enquiry in our master’s dissertation seminar. We were a group of students in the School of Marketing and Management at the Warsaw University who chose Professor Kostera as their supervisor. The seminar was supposed to last for the whole of two years; it started in October 2001 and was entitled “Organizational Anthropology”. It meant that the choice of a supervisor involved also, to a large extent, a commitment to an epistemological standpoint and subsequently to a methodological tradition – ethnography. In other words, this choice and commitment translated into a certain disposition towards the world, something that we acquired along the way during these two years. The choice of the subject of enquiry, as crucial as it usually is, was rather secondary. The method, the disposition, were the starting points. In my case though the subject outgrew and ate everything else, as I chose The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei – the Work of God. The extent to which I did not know what I was doing, the extent of my ignorance, was huge. On the other hand, the circumstances of making this choice were trivial – being tired of, and/or completely uninterested in much of what was going on in the course of my studies, I simply wanted to combine management with something that I would be, at least to some extent, passionate about. To use a very clumsy metaphor, tea leaves are awful when eaten raw, choosing Professor Kostera and organizational anthropology was like drying them and pouring boiling water on them. Opus Dei was supposed to be just a spoonful of sugar. All I wanted was something bearable, a few years later I ended up in 6 the middle of a sugar factory, holding a tiny cup of bitter tea in my hand, not knowing what to do with all the bloody sugar. The reasons behind my choice were personal, as, I suppose, were the reasons of all the other students – one went for an art gallery, another for a supermarket that was at the same time a relic of the communist era in Poland, yet another went for an informal group dedicated to esoteric spiritual practices, and so on. We were allowed to assume the widest possible definition of organization and felt liberated by it, as it often meant an escape from corporate utilitarianism that never goes beyond the notion of effectiveness. Yet my choice turned out to be personal perhaps much more literally, in that, to a large extent subconsciously, I projected through it my deepest and most fundamental questions on my research project. I naively put my “restless heart” (Augustine, Confessions I, 1, 1) into it, while I should have, perhaps, constrained myself to the enquiring intellect searching for truth. Being a Catholic myself, all my life I had been trying to reconcile my Christian faith with everyday reality, but the struggle had always happened somewhat outside my studies at the university and outside many other spheres of my life. By choosing Opus Dei, a part of the Church founded by a saint – Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, I naively condemned myself to years of internal struggles. Why such dramatic words, one may ask. Well, the entire thesis is the answer, and only a partial one too. Let me just say now that not only the fact that Opus Dei is a Catholic organization is at play here, but rather the ‘way’ it is Catholic, a very particular way: it challenges and rarely fails to put a potentially interested person in a desperately defensive position about himself. It all grew on me; in the end I only managed to complete my master’s dissertation because of the unbearable pressure from the outside, as the fieldwork itself never felt completed, and hence I never felt as if I 7 had enough authority to say something. It is very much the same now, as I write these words. I am in the middle of a ‘living’ process, my heart beats in it, while: Analysis of almost any kind requires the death or at least mutilation of that which is analyzed. To identify anything as an explanandum is to offer it up for execution. To alight upon anything as an explanans is to provide at the very least a fearsome weapon of mutilation. Thus words, especially in the form of conceptualizations, serve to imprison, immobilize, and injure that which they seek to address. (Burrell 1996:645) I knew very little about Opus Dei when I started researching it; the interest was based entirely on one newspaper article (Siennicki 2002), written in a relatively favourable tone, which, as I found out in a due course, managed completely to miss the point. That is, however, irrelevant now. What is important is that, in spite of my apparent ignorance, or perhaps because of it, I was strongly advised not to read more. This placed my research in many ways close to grounded theory (see: Glaser and Strauss 1967) and proved to be a blessing in disguise. Otherwise I would surely have ended up stuck among all the controversies and contradictory opinions surrounding the Work before I even entered the field, controversies of which those caused by Dan Brown’s famous The Da Vinci Code (2004) are just a tip of the iceberg. To find my way out, I would have to prematurely make up my mind and begin with a clear agenda.
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