The Chamber IV of the Argentine Federal Court of Cassation now holds in its hands the decision of whether the case for human trafficking and reduction to servitude brought by 44 women—recruited as girls or adolescents between 1972 and 2015 to become auxiliary numeraries of Opus Dei—remains alive or is time-barred. The question on the table is no longer whether those events occurred; it is whether they occurred too long ago. In Rome, meanwhile, Leo XIV met in February with Prelate Ocáriz and his auxiliary vicar, Mariano Fazio—whose investigative statement the federal prosecutor has requested since July—and confirmed to them that the reform of the Work’s statutes, ordered almost four years ago, remains “under study” and without a date. In Buenos Aires a system is being judged; in Rome they are studying how to reform it without naming it. And in both files the piece that explains them is missing: the texts in which that system was set out by its author, in black and white, for internal consumption. A good friend has sent me one of those texts: the volume of meditations While He Spoke to Us on the Road, printed in Rome in 2000, whose authenticity the Work has never denied. Between pages 143 and 155 appears the meditation that José María Escrivá preached to his own on 12 March 1961 under the title “The Good Shepherd.” It must be read slowly, because phrase by phrase it says considerably more than its editors noticed when they printed it.
In that meditation Escrivá recounts a scene on a Castilian road: some men drove thick stakes into the ground, stretched a net around them—“that is why it is called a sheepfold,” he explained—and left it open on only one side; then one man called the sheep with loud cries, “words that carried a certain affection,” and the sheep went in. “What a timely scene!” he exclaimed. He was right, though not in the sense he believed. Rarely has an author supplied so exact an image of his own system: affection at the mouth of the entrance, a net around it, an opening in only one direction. The thirteen pages that follow are devoted to constructing precisely that with materials from the tenth chapter of Saint John.
Formally it is an exhortation to frequent confession and to the manifestation of conscience, and for two-thirds of its length it is conventional asceticism that any director of exercises would sign. The payload lies in the remaining third, and it begins with a surgical operation on the sacred text. The meditation works on John 10, 1-13 and cites, with notarial precision, ten of its thirteen verses: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 13. Three are missing. Verse 6 is an evangelist’s aside and its absence means nothing. The other two are verses 7 and 9: precisely those in which Christ says ego sum ostium—“I am the door of the sheep”; “I am the door: whoever enters through me will be saved,” in the official version of the Episcopal Conference. The omission is not distraction; it is structural necessity, because the door, in this meditation, is doubled. For the sheep it remains Christ—“each one of you has entered through the door, through the love of Christ”—; for the shepherds, the criterion of legitimate passage changes hands: “Do you know who, for my sheep, is the good shepherd? The one who has a mission granted by me.” In John the door is single and the same for the shepherd and for the flock. The two verses that prevent the doubling are the two that are not there.
Installed in the gap, the founder occupies the pronoun. Christ’s sheep become “my sheep.” “Through my mouth Jesus Christ speaks to you in a special way, because I in a special way am the good Shepherd in his name”: the repeated adverb does all the work. “God will call you to account if you do not heed my indications.” And when the thesis needs support, the procedure is always the same: his own question, his own answer, retroactive divine attribution. “And could not other shepherds go to seek my sheep and pasture them? No. No! And it is not I who affirm it, but the Lord himself.” The Lord, in John 10, affirms nothing about the spiritual direction of an institution founded in 1928; the exegesis presents itself as quotation. The scale of values is fixed in a memorable enumeration: “Popes, you will know many; I have known several. Cardinals, by the dozen. Bishops, even more… but Founder of Opus Dei there is only one.” Cardinals by the dozen; founder, unique piece. The entire hierarchy, priced below the proper charism in the only market that matters here, that of scarcity.
The reverse of the operation is the fate that befalls the rest of the Catholic clergy. The “thieves and robbers” of the parable, who in the gospel are those who lack ecclesial mission, come to designate priests with licenses from the Ordinary—that is, approved by the Church—who are reclassified as “the stranger” and “the bad shepherd” from whom one must flee, “even if they are good shepherds of other sheep and even if they are saints,” “even if they work miracles.” Holiness and miracles, the two criteria by which the Church recognizes divine approval, declared insufficient against internal deputation; spiritual direction, on the other hand, “belongs to the local Directors, laymen, laymen!” And to complete the arsenal, the compelle intrare of Luke: where the gospel commands that strangers be urged into the banquet, the meditation reverses the vector and directs coercion inward, against one’s own brothers, in an adjectival escalation that deserves an epitaph: “holy coercion,” “blessed coercion, of love,” and finally “this most beautiful coercion of charity, far from taking away your brother’s freedom, helps him delicately to administer it well.” Four successive adjectives on a noun that is never touched. Coercion, redefined as advice on the administration of another’s freedom.
The mechanical heart of the text is a classic double bind, and what is astonishing is that it is stated without embarrassment. First the solemn legal concession: “all my children enjoy the most absolute freedom to confess to any priest approved by the Ordinary,” without obligation to inform the Directors. Immediately afterward, the annulment: “Does one who acts thus sin? No! Does he have good spirit? No! He has set out to listen to the voice of the bad shepherd.” Escrivá himself compresses the system into four words that no critic could have formulated better: “We can and we cannot. And do I sin? No. And do I have to tell the Directors? No. But I insist: woe to you!, poor, poor little one!” The prophetic curse fused with the maternal diminutive in the same phrase. The right survives only as the matter of its own renunciation: the first sacrifice of the good son consists in “not exercising that right—because we possess it—if we can avoid it, and we can avoid it always or almost always.” The parenthesis preserves the legal fiction inside the sentence that empties it.
Note the architecture: three normative layers. In the legal one, I can. In the moral one, I do not sin; it is granted twice, with exclamation marks. And in the third, that of “spirit,” sanctions fall that no sin in this passage entails: “loss of peace and joy,” “precipice,” “abyss,” “possible perdition of the soul,” “miserable,” “cancerous one who did not want to be cured,” and the terminal clause: “if you truly wish to be saints; if not, you are superfluous.” From which it follows, by the pure internal logic of the text, something theologically extraordinary: a soul can reach possible perdition without having committed any sin along the way. Either the meditation is incoherent, or “good spirit” functions as a soteriological category parallel to the moral law and above it: institutional loyalty tracks salvation where sin does not reach. And the only sin the passage truly assigns does not fall on the one who exercises his right, but on the insufficiently coercive spectators: “I would not excuse from sin those who lived with that son of mine, because they would not have known how to give him the means to persevere, means to which he had a right.” The individual right to choose a confessor is renounced as proof of fidelity; the right that is asserted with energy is the right to be pressured.
There are also two slips that amount to a confession. The first, concerning the seal of confession: “I did not ordinarily confess any of my sons, because I did not consider it logical to remain with my hands tied by the sacramental seal. They, voluntarily, told me everything, everything!, outside of Confession. In this way spiritual direction went forward splendidly.” The sacramental seal, presented as an operational impediment for the one who governs and not as protection for the penitent: the exact inversion of the institution’s purpose. The adverb “voluntarily” arrives after the discourse itself has defined reserve as cowardice, bad spirit and sufficient reason—that is, after abolishing the conditions of the voluntariness it invokes. And it is not a closed foundational anecdote: “as all continue to do now in the fraternal conversation with the Director.” At the summit, the complete fusion of forum and government, in both directions: “now I confess to one of your brothers, and when I rise, he kneels so that I may confess him.” The second slip appears when it is necessary to illustrate the harm of confessing outside: that confessor, before another soul “who is thinking of requesting admission to Opus Dei, might perhaps talk him out of it.” The ledger of damages runs toward the vocational flow. On the same page, the doctrine of the Mystical Body—which is the Church—slides without seam into “the entire body of the Work.” And the entire argument rests on a premise that betrays it: after assuring that “that confessor will keep the sacramental seal, of course,” the following “but” imagines that same confessor orienting his counsel according to what was known in confession. To prove that one must confess inside, it needs to suppose that those outside do exactly what the seal forbids.
The rest is the installation of the climate: all shepherds of all (“you are all the good shepherd”), fraternal correction “sometimes with a glance,” “none is a loose verse,” oves et milites Christi; and reserve, pathologized without respite: whoever does not tell everything, “down to the most trivial things,” is “a madman,” his heart is “rotten,” it is necessary to “insert the scalpel, and cauterize.” With that anthropology installed, the double bind no longer seems coercion: it seems therapy. All under the foundational norm stated with proverbial wisdom: “dirty laundry is washed at home.” It is worth recalling that the Church had already legislated against this: canon 530 of the 1917 Code prohibited superiors from inducing “in any way” the manifestation of conscience of their subjects, precisely because the legislator knew that no precept is needed where spiritual terror suffices. The reason for the norm admits no discussion, and this meditation is its textbook case.
Rome dissolved in 2025 the Sodalitium of Christian Life with abuses of conscience at the center of the file. No sensible person will equate the personal crimes of a Figari with the biography of Escrivá, and this article does not do so. But the technology of government is identical piece by piece: isolation from external counsel, catastrophizing of exit, total transparency upward, sacralization of the founder. Every element is in these thirteen pages, in the founder’s voice, in 1961, printed by the institution itself in 2000. The question, therefore, is not psychological or posthumous; it is ecclesial: what does it mean that the Church canonized in 2002, in a process famous for its speed, the author of a system whose replicas it today dissolves by decree. “What a timely scene!” said the Father before the sheepfold of Castile, the net stretched and the words of affection at the single door. It is the only thing in this meditation that has not aged.
Of the thirteen pages of the meditation “The Good Shepherd,” preached on 12 March 1961 and collected in the volume of internal meditations While He Spoke to Us on the Road (Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, internal edition of Opus Dei, Rome, 2000, pp. 143-155), five passages suffice to understand the system that Argentine courts are now examining. All the following quotations come from that edition.
The first redefines pressure on the brother as an act of love. Starting from the evangelical compelle intrare—where the coercion of the banquet is directed at strangers—Escrivá reverses the vector and directs it inward:
«Also each one of you must be listened to by your brother, when you exercise fraternal correction, sometimes with a glance, sometimes with the consideration the case may require. On other occasions, you may remember that compelle intrare of the Gospel. If the Lord wanted strangers to be compelled to go to the banquet, how much more will he want you to use a holy coercion, a blessed coercion, of love, with your brothers, sheep of the same flock of Jesus Christ! This most beautiful coercion of charity, far from taking away your brother’s freedom, helps him delicately to administer it well. Do not forget it».
J. Escrivá, «The Good Shepherd» (12-III-1961), While He Spoke to Us on the Road, Rome, 2000, pp. 143-155.
Four successive adjectives on a noun—coercion—that is never withdrawn. The second passage establishes who is speaking, with what authority and over whose sheep:
«Take your notes, and engrave in your heart what I tell you. Because it is not only a priest who speaks to you: it is the Founder, and there is only one. Popes, you will know many; I have known several. Cardinals, by the dozen. Bishops, even more… but Founder of Opus Dei there is only one, although he be of such little foundation as I: only one! And God will call you to account if you do not heed my indications. Through my mouth Jesus Christ speaks to you in a special way, because I in a special way am the good Shepherd in his name. […] Do you know who, for my sheep, is the good shepherd? The one who has a mission granted by me. […] People who do not know Opus Dei are not in a position to act as shepherd of my sheep, even if they are good shepherds of other sheep and even if they are saints».
Ibid.
The entire hierarchy priced below the proper charism, and Christ’s sheep turned into “my sheep.” On that authority is mounted the central mechanism, a double bind stated without embarrassment: the right to confess outside exists, but exercising it carries a price in a third normative layer—the “spirit”—where sanctions fall that no sin entails:
«All my children enjoy the most absolute freedom to confess to any priest approved by the Ordinary, and they are not obliged to tell the Directors of the Work that they have done so. Does one who acts thus sin? No! Does he have good spirit? No! He has set out to listen to the voice of the bad shepherd. […] If the soul […] requires timely and rapid counsel, the most intense spiritual direction, it must not be sought outside the Work. Whoever behaved otherwise would voluntarily depart from the good path and go toward the abyss; without doubt, he would have lost the good spirit. […] If you did this, you would have bad spirit, you would be a wretch. By that act you would not sin, but woe to you! […] Resolutions! Clarity of ideas! We can and we cannot. And do I sin? No. And do I have to tell the Directors? No. But I insist: woe to you!, poor, poor little one!».
Ibid.
The fourth passage reveals what that funnel is for. The secrecy of confession, presented as an operational hindrance for the one who governs, and a practice that the text itself declares still in force:
«My children, open your souls! Your first brothers left you a colossal example. I did not want to confess them. Now I confess to one of your brothers, and when I rise, he kneels so that I may confess him. We have been doing this for many years. But, at the beginning, I did not ordinarily confess any of my sons, because I did not consider it logical to remain with my hands tied by the sacramental seal. They, voluntarily, told me everything, everything!, outside of Confession. In this way spiritual direction went forward splendidly and the souls were sanctified. […] as all continue to do now in the fraternal conversation with the Director».
Ibid.
The “voluntariness” arrives after the discourse has already labeled reserve as cowardice and bad spirit. And the closing turns the renunciation of the right into proof of belonging, with insularity elevated to a foundational norm:
«And you must be ready to face them all as well. And the first one is quite clear: not to exercise that right—because we possess it—if we can avoid it, and we can avoid it always or almost always. Firm purpose: the first sacrifice consists in not forgetting, in life, what is expressed in Castile in a very graphic way: that dirty laundry is washed at home. The first manifestation that you give of yourselves is not to have the cowardice to go and wash dirty laundry outside the Work. If you truly wish to be saints; if not, you are superfluous. […] you will decide with good sense not to use certain rights, in order to achieve, instead, greater efficacy in the work of your sanctification and of the sanctification of the entire Work».
Ibid.
Isolation from external counsel, sacralization of the founder, practical annulment of a formally granted right and total transparency upward: each piece is stated by its author, for internal consumption, and printed by the institution itself.
Source of the quotations: Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, meditation “The Good Shepherd” (12 March 1961), in While He Spoke to Us on the Road, volume of internal meditations, Opus Dei, Rome, 2000, pp. 143-155. The fragments are reproduced under the right of quotation (art. 32.1 of the Intellectual Property Law) for purposes of information, analysis and critical judgment.