Opus Dei in the United States began building relationships with right-wing evangelicals no later than George W. Bush’s election campaign in 2000.
Continued. Started in The Alliance of Right-wing Catholics and Right-wing Protestants in the US (Part I)
Strange things at NAR
Tax reports show rapid growth in Ziklag’s finances in recent years. Its annual income grew from $1.3 million in 2018 to $6 million in 2019 and nearly $12 million in 2022, the latest report available.
However, Ziklag’s wallet size is incomparable to the spending of major conservative sponsors such as Miriam Adelson or Barre Seida, an electronics magnate who has allocated $1.6 billion to a group led by conservative activist lawyer Leonard Leo. Hundreds of millions of dollars are regularly invested in various American political and charitable groups by confidential donor networks — from the liberal Alliance for Democracy to the Koch-affiliated right-wing organization Stand Together. In other words, Ziklag’s scale is not enough to be the main source of funding for Trump’s election campaign.
Another oddity of the New Apostolic Reformation, whose elite wing is represented by Ziklag, is that from the very beginning, this movement was formed as a loose association of various Pentecostal movements, but with a structure of ideological control. This gives reason to believe that some powerful entity is behind the creation of such a structure.
Trump and Opus Dei Trump’s opponents point directly to this actor. In their opinion, the inspirer of Trumpism is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a member of the Catholic order Opus Dei. He is believed to have been behind the ambitious Project 2025 document, published by the Heritage Foundation as a program for the next Republican president, who turned out to be Trump.
Roberts described the 922-page Project 2025, written with the participation of many co-authors, as “the second American revolution” in August 2024. In a podcast with Stephen Bannon, another right-wing Catholic, Trump’s adviser and chief strategist for his 2016 election campaign, he promised that this revolution would be “bloodless.”
Immediately after the 2024 US election, Roberts’ book Dawn’s Early Light was published, with a foreword by J.D. Vance, who became US vice president in November 2024. The book has the subtitle: “Taking Back Washington to Save America” In the foreword, Vance called on the right to “circle the wagons and load the muskets” to go into battle with Roberts’ ideas as their “main weapon.”
Another influential member of the Catholic elite close to Trump was Leonard Leo, former vice president of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society typically recommends candidates for judgeships, including Supreme Court justices, to Republican presidents. Leo is a Knight of Malta and a member of Opus Dei. He denies membership in the latter. However, Leo sits on the board of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., which is considered the headquarters of Opus Dei in the United States.
Journalist Greg Olear reported on Leonard Leo in an article on the British website Church and State on February 21, 2021. This website is part of the Church Monitoring Network, chaired by Durham University professor and philosopher Stephen Mumford, who researches the influence of the Catholic Church in the United States as a hobby. Olear writes: “Along with former Attorney General Bill Barr, Leonard Leo served on the board of the Catholic Information Center, the Opus Dei stronghold on K Street in Washington, a few blocks from the White House. As such, he must have been influenced by the former head of that same Catholic Information Center, Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest. McCloskey was singlehandedly responsible for recruiting a number of powerful Washington insiders to…well, if not Opus Dei proper, then something decidedly un-American.“
John McCloskey is known for enthusiastically discussing his futuristic essay in the early 2000s, which optimistically described the consequences of a “relatively bloodless” civil war in the United States, which would result in the Catholic Church being purged of all dissent and the United States being divided along religious lines. In the early 2000s, McCloskey’s circle included friends of Leonard Leo (and US Supreme Court Justices) Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; Thomas’s wife, Ginny Thomas; Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI; the late conservative columnist Robert Novak, who worked for the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and CNN; former Kansas Governor Sam Brownback; conservative journalist Larry Kudlow; Newt Gingrich, who led the Republicans to power in the US House of Representatives in the 1990s; FBI agent Robert Hanssen and lawyer Bill Barr, who would later become US Attorney General.
When McCloskey was forced to leave his job at the Catholic Information Center due to allegations of sexual harassment, Leo remained there. And as of 2021, Leo’s inner circle included: five judges he appointed to the US Supreme Court (John Roberts, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett); former White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Trump’s lawyer (during his first term) for homeland security, Ken Cuccinelli; Roger Severino, who, as director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, developed a series of measures against LGBT people (organization banned in Russia), and his wife, Carrie Severino; Leo Mick Mulvaney, former head of the US Office of Management and Budget and former acting White House chief of staff, Trump’s most trusted aide; Don McGahn, former White House chief of staff and former White House counsel, who remained in his position long enough to facilitate the appointment of judges approved by Leo. Two other radical Catholics that Olear advises paying attention to are former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon and Academy head Erik Prince.
In addition, entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel, who paved the way for US Vice President Jay D. Vance into politics, was friends with Father Arne Panula, who ran the Opus Dei chapter on the Stanford campus. After graduating from Stanford University, Father Arne Panula served as vicar of Opus Dei in New York from 1998 to 2002. He later served as director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington until his death in 2017. You can learn more about the friendship between Till and Panula in Mary Eberstadt’s book The Last Homily: Conversations with Fr. Arne Panula.
Vance wrote that he was initially prompted to think about Catholicism by reading Augustine’s City of God, which he took up after one of Peter Thiel’s speeches. Thiel is not Catholic, but the fact that he is not Catholic is not proof of a lack of cooperation with Opus Dei. This is because Opus Dei members are divided into three large groups.
The first group is the so-called numenaries, who live in male or female dormitories and have taken a vow of celibacy. They work at regular jobs and also carry out assignments for the order.
The second group is the supernumenaries. They have families and live normal lives, donate money to the order, participate in the order’s activities, and may carry out the order’s assignments from time to time. Both the numenaries and supernumenaries are Catholics.
The third group of people, who may work on behalf of the order, is not exclusively Catholic. These are the so-called associates of the order — people who live ordinary lives but carry out the orders of the order. They are not formally members of the order, and their connection to the order can only be established with certainty if they themselves disclose it. Alternatively, their connections may be indicated by their acquaintances and social circle. It is not possible to determine the exact size of this group.
However, we know for sure that the most active supporters of Trump among believers are Protestants who can be attributed to the New Apostolic Reformation. And Opus Dei are Catholics, although they can cooperate with Protestants. So is there any connection between the Catholic order and the NAR?
A coalition of Catholics and Protestants
Back in the 2000s, there was some discussion in the US about a coalition of right-wing Catholics and right-wing Protestants. The background to the formation of such a coalition was described on November 2, 2002, in The Boston Globe in an article entitled “The Crusaders.”
The article mainly discussed conservative Catholics and their resistance to the liberalization of the church’s position. And the most prominent conservative mentioned was John McCloskey, who headed the Catholic Information Center opposite the White House when Leonard Leo began working there.
McCloskey grew up in Washington, D.C., and until the late 1970s, he was successfully engaged in trading at the investment bank Merrill Lynch. However, in 1981, he was ordained a priest in Opus Dei. He was ordained by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, then the Archbishop of Marseille. The cardinal’s connection to Opus Dei is not explicitly described in his biography; however, on September 1, 1981, the newspaper El Pais reported that “the Archbishop of Marseille and the President of the French Bishops’ Conference (i.e., Etchegaray) last Sunday ordained 62 persons as members of Opus Dei.” And a non-member of the order cannot ordain new members into the order.
McCloskey actively promoted Catholicism in the media, for example, on CNN, and in the newspapers USA Today and The New York Times. Moreover, he converted several representatives of the conservative elite to Catholicism. McCloskey personally baptized Judge Robert Bork, political experts Robert Novak and Lawrence Kudlow, publisher Alfred Regnery, financier Lewis Lehrman, and US Senator Sam Brownback from Kansas, whose baptismal sponsor was another senator, Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania. In 2000, McCloskey baptized Mark Belnick, the lead lawyer for Tyco International (a security systems company), who in return donated 2 million dollars to a Catholic college and an anti-abortion group. McCloskey also converted Newt Gingrich to Catholicism (after he had become Speaker of the US House of Representatives).
Another prominent example of a conservative Catholic cited in The Boston Globe article was Deal Hudson, who in 1995 became the head of the magazine Crisis, a mouthpiece for conservative Catholic thought. Hudson converted to Catholicism in 1984 at the age of 32. Before that, he was a Baptist minister. In one of the magazine’s first issues, Hudson published his article on a possible alliance between evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. However, at that time, the attempt to create such a coalition, consisting predominantly of Protestants, failed. In particular, because Catholic bishops caused a scandal over the political literature that the coalition was distributing outside Catholic churches.
In 1999, George W. Bush’s election campaign hired Hudson to help attract a portion of the Catholic vote. Hudson’s efforts were generally not very successful—less than 50% of Catholics were willing to vote for Bush. However, as the article emphasized, “the remaining portion of John McCloskey’s righteous ones seemed to be moving towards achieving a common political position, at least with conservative Protestants.”
In other words, Opus Dei in the United States began building relationships with right-wing evangelicals no later than George W. Bush’s election campaign in 2000. “The Bush campaign became the first real attempt to reunite conservative Catholics with the religious right,” concludes the author of the article “The Crusaders.”
Recall that the organization Ziklag— an elite structure of right-wing evangelicals of the NAR — was created with the goal of uniting all influential Christians.
So, what do we see in American politics in 2025?
The “Project 2025” program, which is the unofficial (Trump has stated he has no connection to it) program of the current presidential administration, was written at the Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, according to American media reports, is a member of Opus Dei.
Six (the majority) of the US Supreme Court justices are Catholics, with five appointed at the behest of Leonard Leo.
In an article by Nina Burleigh on September 19, 2024, in New York Magazine, titled “How Opus Dei Conquered Washington D.C.,” Opus Dei is called a “mysterious clique with tentacles into the elite.” And the following is stated: “The Catholic Information Center, which doubles as the Opus Dei office in Washington, and the national network of wealthy and powerful right-wing Catholics affiliated with it are among the most effective forces in MAGA world and the American Christian-nationalist movement. It is allied with Protestant Evangelicals in many of its goals but is more hierarchical and often more institutionally organized. Opus Dei can marshal centuries of intellectual heft of the Church behind it.“
As already mentioned, the NAR, whose pastors played a significant role in bringing Trump to power, was created as a loose coalition of Pentecostal churches, but with an organ of ideological control that cannot arise on its own in a loose coalition. This organ of ideological control must be created by an entity with experience in such control. And in light of all the above, it can be assumed that this entity is Opus Dei.
Burleigh’s article also states that US Vice President Vance was pushed towards conversion to Catholicism by friends connected to Opus Dei, including his long-time friend Rod Dreher, a newly converted “post-liberal” writer and a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. Dreher moved from the US to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where he works at the Danube Institute. Dreher compares Vance to a young Orbán, thereby paying Vance a compliment.
So, what is Opus Dei today? Journalist Gareth Gore, author of the book ” Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church” in an interview with the Glad You Asked podcast on April 11, 2025, said that Opus Dei is an officially sanctioned wing of the Catholic Church, with about 100,000 members, roughly half of whom live in Europe. In the U.S., he estimates, there are about 3,000 members of Opus Dei, with the majority concentrated around Washington. In total, the order is present in 70 countries.
After many years of research, Gore considers Opus Dei a political reactionary force, and an elite one at that. The order began accepting people in positions that allow them to actively oppose “progressive,” meaning socialist (and originally communist), politicians.
Opus Dei is a personal prelature of the Pope, and because of this, members of the organization do not submit to local church authorities and do not report to them, but act independently of them and report only to the Pope. According to Gore, the order is a network of local cells that operate at the local level.
Officially, members of the order are ordinary Catholics who simply live together and help each other. In reality, according to Gore, edicts continuously come from the Vatican stating exactly how members should live and how many new members they must recruit within a certain period. The official goal of the order is to help people achieve holiness in everyday life. But for that, one doesn’t need to recruit exclusively influential individuals with remarkable persistence and receive edicts from the Vatican.
Conclusion
Is Opus Dei under Trump the force that determines everything? No.
Because even the Supreme Court justices do not always indulge Trump’s desires, and, for example, the same Pat Cipollone and Bill Barr did everything to ensure that Trump could not challenge the 2020 election results and left. So, this was either a cunning plan by the order, the goal of which is to have Trump return later with a resounding victory and, after all the persecutions, have the moral right to conduct purges of the state apparatus and increase the role of presidential power in the US, or Trump personally is somehow inconvenient for Opus Dei.
And Trump himself is not too happy with the same Leonard Leo. On May 29, 2025, Trump criticized Leo because a panel of judges, including a Trump appointee, ruled most of the tariffs he had introduced illegal. In a post on the Truth Social network, the US president criticized the judges behind this decision, calling it “horrible, threatening the country” and suggesting that the judges made it out of hatred for him personally. Then he launched criticism at Leo and the Federalist Society, which provides Trump with a list of judicial candidates.
That is, Trump is at least not entirely dependent on Opus Dei and can do something the order doesn’t want. However, US Vice President Vance and the people guiding him are directly connected to Opus Dei, and Vance’s ascent to power, coupled with a sharp increase in the powers of the US president, could place the United States under the control of this supranational structure.
Let us also note that if NAR supporters consider Trump to be something like God’s chosen one, for Opus Dei he is nothing more than a means to implement plans, although the order’s goals coincide with those of right-wing evangelicals in terms of establishing Christianity in the US and worldwide (note, understood in a specific way by its adherents). Whether these plans fully coincide is impossible to say, since Opus Dei’s strategic plans are not disclosed.
Let us also note that if a transnational organization like Opus Dei is behind the right-conservative forces in the US, then the synchronous rise to power of right-wing regimes in the US and other countries, particularly in Latin America and Europe, becomes understandable. It also immediately becomes clear where the international conservative conferences (CPAC) came from, and there’s no need to even talk about Opus Dei’s connections with the Nazis—the order was created to fight communists in Spain and closely collaborated with Franco’s regime all the years of its existence. Furthermore, the order supported Pinochet and other Latin American dictators and can hardly be not connected to neo-Nazis. And here, a question rises, how and for what purposes does this transnational organization interact with right-wing conservatives in Russia? And that it does interact, there is no doubt. It was created precisely for such interactions.
Well, and the last question: what does Ziklag have to do with it? Since Opus Dei prefers not to act openly, some front organization was needed to mobilize the “common people,” one that would provide money for promoting the agenda the order needs. And Ziklag fits the role of such a front quite well—recall that the organization allocated sufficient funds to key areas of the American domestic political agenda to keep Trump’s voters “in tone,” but its resources did not allow it to significantly influence the elections themselves through, for example, frequent airing of political advertisements. At the same time, we are not claiming that all members of Ziklag know that they are acting in the interests of a Catholic order. But is that so important if in practice they are implementing the policies the order needs?
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
