These days, an international forum of women is being held in Buenos Aires who denounce having been subjected to conditions of labor exploitation and servitude within the Opus Dei. The meeting, organized by the international network Ending Clergy Abuse, brings together former auxiliary numeraries and other women linked to domestic tasks within the prelature, from several countries in Latin America and Europe.
It is the first public and coordinated international meeting of complainants who share a common pattern in their testimonies: having been recruited as minors or very young, in contexts of social vulnerability, under the promise of education or personal advancement, only to end up performing intensive domestic chores for years without pay, without qualifications, and under a strict regime of control over their personal lives.
The stated objective of the forum is to give public visibility to the testimonies, share experiences, coordinate legal strategies, and demand an institutional response both in the civil and ecclesial spheres.
A criminal case open for alleged trafficking and exploitation
The meeting takes place while a criminal investigation remains open in Argentina for alleged crimes of human trafficking, reduction to servitude, and labor exploitation. The case, initiated based on complaints filed by 43 women in 2021, investigates events that occurred between the 1970s and 2015 in structures linked to the Opus Dei in South America.
According to the judicial file, the complainants state that their lives were oriented almost exclusively toward domestic work in the institution’s male residences, without remuneration, with severe restrictions on communication with their families, and under an internal obedience that affected even basic everyday decisions. The proceedings continue, although they have been slowed by various procedural incidents.
The institutional response from Opus Dei
Opus Dei has categorically rejected the accusations, describing them as a media distortion of labor and pension claims, and has emphasized the need to respect due process and the presumption of innocence. The prelature maintains that it will collaborate with the justice system and that those involved must be able to offer their version of the facts.
At the same time, the institution insists that the complainants acted freely and that the conditions described do not correspond to the reality of life within Opus Dei.
Coincidence with the statutory review in Rome
The Buenos Aires meeting coincides with a particularly sensitive moment in the institutional life of Opus Dei, when the Holy See is examining its new statutes following the reform promoted in 2022, which modified its legal framework and its relationship with the Roman Curia.
This temporal coincidence reinforces the perception that the case is not limited to a local or judicial conflict, but raises broader issues about certain internal structures and their adequacy to canon law and contemporary ecclesial practice.
The unresolved problem of consecrated laity after the Council
Beyond the specific case, the testimonies once again bring to the table a broader and cross-cutting problem in the Church: the insufficiently delimited development of the figure of so-called consecrated laity, especially in the period following the Second Vatican Council.
This is not a reality created ex novo by the post-conciliar period, but rather a form of life whose expansion, practical legitimation, and institutional consolidation has largely occurred in the post-conciliar Church, often without a proportional juridical and anthropological clarification to the demands imposed on those who assume it.
These people are not religious in the strict sense, as they do not take public vows nor belong to institutes of consecrated life, but neither do they live as ordinary laity. In many movements and ecclesial realities, their lives involve total dedication, internal obedience, residence in institutional centers, lack of economic autonomy, and meticulous regulation of daily life that, in practice, comes much closer to classical religious life than to secular laity.
A cross-cutting issue in many ecclesial movements
This intermediate model, poorly defined and scarcely regulated, is not exclusive to Opus Dei, but cuts across numerous movements, associations, and realities that emerged or developed strongly after the Council. In many cases, it has been promoted with good intentions, under the language of vocation, freedom, and generous dedication, but without establishing clear limits, objective guarantees, or effective protection mechanisms for the most vulnerable people.
The experience accumulated in recent decades shows that when radical dedication is combined with obedience without precise legal status and economic renunciation without the guarantees typical of traditional consecrated life, it creates fertile ground for abuses of power, conscience, and, in some cases, labor or personal exploitation.
Is it time to rethink this figure?
The testimonies heard in Buenos Aires are not presented as an attack on the Church or a denial of consecrated life. Many of the women still consider themselves believers and demand to be heard within the ecclesial community.
The debate that opens does not require uncritically adopting the ideological frameworks of certain international media, but it does invite serious and serene reflection on whether the figure of the consecrated layperson, as it has developed in the post-conciliar Church, needs a profound review. Reviewing limits, forms of operation, legal guarantees, and anthropological criteria does not weaken the Church, but strengthens it.
If certain structures repeatedly generate deep human wounds, the problem cannot always be reduced to individual errors. At stake is the internal coherence of realities that have been presented for decades as paradigms of fidelity and dedication. Because holiness does not need gray areas of law or structural ambiguities. And because the Church cannot continue postponing a reflection that affects the concrete good of people who say they have given everything to it.