The relationship between religion and politics has been and continues to be a toxic and dangerous relationship. A key U.S. player in that relationship today is Kevin Roberts and his Heritage Foundation.

Kevin D. Roberts (born 1974) is the president of the Heritage Foundation, an activist conservative political think tank, based in Washington DC. Prior to assuming his current role, Roberts was the CEO of another conservative think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank that opposes efforts to fight climate change and receives millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests.

Roberts is the architect of Project 2025, also known as the “2025 Presidential Transition Project,” an initiative of the Heritage Foundation. It aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election. It calls for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuels. It recommends abolishing the Department of Education and terminating its programs. Funding for climate research would be cut. The National Institutes of Health would be reformed along conservative principles and Medicare and Medicaid would be terminated.

The publication of a book written by Kevin D. Roberts, titled Dawn’s Early Light, and featuring a foreword by Senator JD Vance, has been delayed until after the presidential election. The book was scheduled to be published in September but will now be released in November. Roberts drew criticism recently for saying the country was in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” A Heritage Foundation spokeswoman confirmed the publication delay of the book and provided an explanatory statement from Roberts, who said: “There’s a time for writing, reading and book tours, and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country.”

Actually Project 2025 lays out what is essentially a very conservative “Christian nationalist vision” of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity. It opposes what it calls “radical gender ideology” and advocates that the government “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. To achieve this, it proposes ending same-sex marriage and removing protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual or gender identity.

Project 2025 also recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants. It proposes employing the military for domestic law enforcement and calls for immediate capital punishment of convicted offenders.

What many observers don’t realize is that Kevin D. Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, has close ties to the Catholic organization Opus Dei (“Work of God”). Opus Dei has long attracted significant controversy. Criticism has centered on its secretiveness and support for authoritarian, right-wing governments. A still important book about Opus Dei is Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei by Robert A. Hutchison (St Martins Press, 1999). I would also recommend the still very important book by my friend Betty Clermont The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Clarity Press, 2009).

Kevin Roberts receives regular Opus Dei spiritual guidance at the Catholic Information Center, in Washington DC, headed by an Opus Dei priest. Another Opus Dei linked U.S. Catholic is Leonard Leo (born 1965), a self-declared Opus Dei operative. He is a lawyer, judicial activist, and co-chairman of the conservative legal think tank, the Federalist Society for Law and Policy. Leo has also emerged as a key architect and funder of Project 2025, backed by billions of dollars of slush fund dark money. Leo has actually created a network of influential conservative legal groups funded mostly by anonymous donors. He assisted Chief Justice Clarence Thomas in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States by a narrow Senate majority of 52 to 48. Leonard Leo also led campaigns to support the nominations of the conservative justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. All far-right Catholics except Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic but is now a member of the Episcopal Church.

Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by the Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá (1902 – 1975). Popes Pius XII (1876 – 1958), John Paul II (1920 – 2005), and Benedict XVI (1927 – 2022) were strong supporters of Opus Dei. Josemaría Escrivá was declared a saint in 2002 by Pope John Paul II, who said Escrivá should be “counted among the great witnesses of Christianity.” Well, I find it significant that Escrivá was active in bolstering the support of Fascist regimes, including that of Francisco Franco (1936 – 1975) in Spain and Augusto Pinochet (1917 – 2006) in Chile.

Although controversial, Opus Dei remains influential within the Catholic Church. Lay people make up the majority of its membership. The remainder are secular priests under the governance of a prelate (leader) elected by specific members and appointed by the Pope. Fernando Ocáriz Braña a Catholic priest born in Paris in 1944, has been the head of Opus Dei since 2017 and he is the fourth person to head Opus Dei since its founding in 1928. Two of Opus Dei’s earlier prelates were bishops appointed by Pope John Paul II. Well known in the Vatican, Ocáriz has been an advisor to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), once known as the Holy Office, since 1986.  In 2022, Pope Francis announced that the head of Opus Dei would no longer be a bishop, but he said he has very positive sentiments about Opus Dei.

As of 2023, there were 95,890 members of Opus Dei: 93,784 lay persons and 2,106 priests. The current Archbishop of Los Angeles, José Horacio Gómez (born 1951) was the first numerary member of Opus Dei to be consecrated a bishop in the United States. (A numerary member of Opus Dei is a member who takes a vow of celibacy.) Archbishop Gómez was President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2019 to 2022. Another Opus Dei bishop is John Barres (born 1960) the Bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York. He is a graduate of Opus Dei’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He joined Opus Dei as priest. In general, Opus Dei bishops in the United States tend not identify as members of Opus Dei because bishops have only one superior, the pope.

The British journalist and Associate Editor at Thomson Reuters, Gareth Gore, has written a new book about Opus Dei, which comes out in early October 2024: Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Gore observed recently: “Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society…. For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”

Well, a lot to think about. A lot of big issues underlie the 2024 U.S. presidential election, involving politics and religion. During this election year, a growing number of Catholic priests and bishops, for example, are talking politics from the pulpit. But there are positive developments as well. Bishops like John Stowe (born 1966), Bishop of the Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, have criticized the Christian nationalist, un-Christlike actions of their right-wing bishop colleagues. It is hopeful as well that close to 29,000 Catholics and ecumenical allies have signed a petition from Faithful America, urging members of the U.S. bishops’ conference to refrain from involvement in the 2024 election and to withhold support for the former U.S. president now running for re-election.

I conclude this week’s reflection with a quote from Sandra Day O’Connor (1930 – 2023) who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 until her retirement in 2006. O’Connor was the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. She retired from the bench in 2006 to care for her husband, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

• Jack

 

PS:  Just to clarify, I am not anti-Catholic but a serious Catholic observer. All religious traditions, from time to time, have their positive as well as their negative movements. We need to be critical of the negative and promote the positive.

 

John A. Dick, Ph.D. — Historical Theologian

Email: john.dick@kuleuven.be