Information from Amazon.fr about "In hell of Opus Dei"

In hell of Opus Dei (Paperback) by Veronica Duborgel

Product Descriptions (Details about the product)

Paperback: 184 pages
Publisher: Albin Michel (October 3, 2007)
Collection: TRIAL DOC.
Language: French
ISBN-10: 2226180567
ISBN-13: 978-2226180568
Average customer comment: No comment existing client.
Sales rank Amazon.fr: 873 in Books (See Best Sellers in the heading Books)
Price: EUR 15.00
Price: EUR 14.25
FREE DELIVERY See details Save: EUR 0.75 (5%)
Availability: Usually shipped under 10 to 14 days. Shipment and sold by Amazon.fr. Gift wrapping available. Do you want to be delivered Tuesday, November 6 before 13 o'clock?

Product Descriptions (Editor's presentation):
Since its inception in 1928, Opus Dei arouses controversy, even within the Catholic circles where it is produced. Founded by Bishop Escrivà de Balaguer, this powerful institution provided it fascinates worried. As long by the multiplicity of its ramifications than in the authoritarian traditionalism which characterizes. Submission to the order total, voluntary sacrifices, corporal mortification, spirit of penance are the daily lives of members of the Work of God. For thirteen years, Veronique has suffered its law: reprimands (the "fraternal correction"), indoctrination and admonitions on the part of a hierarchy that refuses even to hear his suffering. "Your cross," s'entend-elle respond. Until that day in March 1996 when she decided to break and where "the Work" is turned against it. Through his testimony overwhelming and amazing, it is the backstage of a secretive and opaque world that we are entering. A world where obedience and punishment are going much further than we could imagine.


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(Product Info:
http://www.amazon.fr/Dans-lenfer-lOpus-Véronique-Duborgel/dp/2226180567)

Book lifts cowl on 'misogynist' Opus Dei

Last Updated: 2:25am GMT 05/11/2007
From Telegraph, UK:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/04/nopusdei104.xml

Defector tells of threats and humiliation she suffered during 13 years in secret sect
A mother of nine has lifted the lid on Opus Dei, the controversial Catholic organisation featured in Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, which portrayed it as a mysterious and cult-like -institution.

87,000 members spreading the word
Véronique Duborgel re-counts in a new book, Inside the Hell of Opus Dei, the 13 years she spent as a member of the group, which she describes as rigid, insensitive, sectarian and misogynistic.

The 44-year-old kindergarten teacher describes techniques of psychological isolation similar to those sometimes used by sects, and claims that Opus Dei intrudes into the most intimate areas of members' private lives, encourages them to inform on each other and drains their financial resources. Mrs Duborgel writes that she was instructed not to tell family or friends that she was a member of Opus Dei.

"I was told they might ask awkward questions and it would avoid family conflicts if they didn't know," she told The Sunday Telegraph.

She had also been told to drop friends who had no inclination to join the organisation. Each year she was required to give the names of three friends, known as St Joseph's List, whom she would have to try to persuade to join Opus Dei over the next 12 months.

Members were encouraged to look upon each other as "a family", but Mrs Duborgel said she was forbidden to share intimate confidences with her "sisters" – other female members of Opus Dei. Instead, she had to discuss personal matters with a spiritual director, "someone we had not chosen and whom we were obliged to report to."

Members were instructed to appear joyful, even when sad or depressed. "It was a form of psychological isolation," she said, adding that she had survived by concealing the existence of some friends she made through her children's school. "With them I could talk about the normal stuff, but I was obliged to live a double life, otherwise I would have got my knuckles rapped," she said.

Every 15 days, Mrs Duborgel's spiritual director questioned her about her faith, and occasionally about the most intimate details of her marriage. "Once she warned me not to buy sexy underwear because it led men into temptation," she added.

She added that her spiritual director also asked her to spy on other women to find out if they used contraception – labelled a sin by the Catholic Church. She refused, but was denounced by fellow members for crossing her legs at Mass ("disrespectful and immodest"), for wearing trousers ("too provocative") and for not wearing enough make-up.

On being upbraided because she had not re-dyed her hair, she objected that she had never done so, but was told the unfounded reprimand had been "good for her humility".
"I realised then that Opus Dei was more about humiliation than humility," she said.

When Mrs Duborgel confided to two Opus Dei priests that her then husband, a 48-year-old former university professor who now lives in a monastery, beat and insulted her, she was told: "It's your cross, you must bear it."

Opus Dei has opted to turn the other cheek over Mrs Duborgel's book. A spokeswoman, Beatrice de la Coste, said: "We sympathise with the suffering expressed in this work. It gives us great sadness. This woman was not sufficiently listened to."

The organisation would not pursue the author or the book legally, she said, adding: "We are not going to attack someone who is suffering."

"I am not suffering at all," retorted Mrs Duborgel. "The suffering was when I was in Opus Dei."

Mrs Duborgel was drawn into the organisation by her future husband, who kept his own membership secret until after she joined. She says the secrecy governing Opus Dei is illustrated by a Latin prayer, which members must recite daily on their knees. "I was told to learn it off by heart so if I was surprised by anyone there would be no written trace of the prayer," she said.

The couple gave €400 (£275) a month and a bigger contribution at Christmas to Opus Dei, whose worth is estimated to be £1.4?billion. "We were told to consider Opus Dei as an extra child we had to support. But it cost me more than all my children put together," said Mrs Duborgel, who lives in Strasbourg with six of her nine children.

The Da Vinci Code vividly portrays the practice of "corporal mortification" by Silas the Albino, the murderous, self-flagellating monk, but Mrs Duborgel said she was encouraged only to take cold showers and forego treats.

"Dan Brown's novel is not very accurate about the organisation of Opus Dei, but where he got it exactly right is in his portrayal of a group who are prepared to do anything to maintain their power."

The last straw came at an Opus Dei conference at which a senior member said women were the equals of dogs. "He was not joking," she said.

She finally summoned up the courage to leave in 1996 when her husband, who opposed her plan, was away. From her anger at her treatment, her book was born – a book she expects Opus Dei members will be forbidden to read.

Power and Control in Opus Dei

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Foucault Discipline and Punish quotes
Tuesday 12 April 2005, by Neal Andrew

There are many parallels to be drawn between current antiterrorist legal and penal developments and the medieval and modern economies of power that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.

Opacity of Criminal Procedures
First, the opacity of current procedures. One of the main controversies of current and proposed antiterrorist legislation in the UK is that suspects are not allowed to see the evidence against them. Turning to Foucault’s historical account we can see some resemblances in the opacity and secrecy of the archaic sovereign regime:

«The entire criminal procedure, right up to the sentence, remained secret: that is to say, opaque, not only to the public but also to the accused himself. It took place without him, or at least without his having any knowledge of the charges or of the evidence. In the order of criminal justice, knowledge was the absolute privilege of the prosecution.» [1]

In the period that Foucault describes, the production of truth forms part of complex economy of power. The means of investigation and the means of punishment coincide. Today, as then, suspicion is the «mark of a certain degree of guilt as regards the suspect and a limited form of penalty as regards punishment». [2]

The procedures of investigation/punishment relate not to transparent codes of law and scientific truth, but to the symbolic affirmation of sovereign power. As Foucault writes:

«The secret ... form of the procedure reflects the principle that... the establishment of truth was the absolute right and the exclusive power of the sovereign...» [3]

The Body in Economies of Truth and Punishment

It is the body that constitutes the central object and point of application of both the means of acquiring the truth of guilt, but also the point of punishment for the guilt that is already presumed:

«The body interrogated in torture constituted the point of application of the punishment and the locus of extortion of truth. And just as presumption was inseparably an element in the investigation and a fragment of guilt, the regulated pain involved in judicial torture was a means of both punishment and of investigation.» [4]

The body is a necessary component in what Foucault describes as the sovereign’s right of life and death. The body, marked by torture, bears the imprints of guilt, the marks of retribution that correspond to the terrible acts committed and the reaffirmation of sovereign power. Unlike the ideal of modern legal proceedings, the truth of the crime is not uncovered by Aristotelian ‘reason without passion’. The sovereign claims ownership of the crime and its truth and therefore claims ownership over the production and demonstration of this truth. The body is not simply the object of punishment, but the site of the production of sovereign truth and the inscription of the symbolic and material reality of sovereign power:

«The body, several times tortured, provides the synthesis of the reality of the deeds and truth of the investigation, of the documents of the case and the statements of the criminal, of the crime and the punishment. It is an element, therefore, in a penal liturgy, in which it must serve as the partner of a procedure ordered around the formidable rights of the sovereign, the prosecution and secrecy.» [5]

Sovereign Power, Vengeance and Exceptionality

A symbolic crime against sovereignty is not simply an affront to the law, but an affront to sovereignty itself.

«It ... requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person. The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign’s right to make war on his enemies». [6]
In its symbolic import the spectacle of Guantanamo, however shrouded in mystery, corresponds to the spectacle of public execution in the middle ages.

«Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, at its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.» [7]

Guantanamo is a contemporary echo of the archaic form of sovereignty that Foucault describes in such detail. As he explains:

«in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous, irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the sovereign and of his power.» [8] [my italics].
The exceptionality of this archaic power lingers on today in synthesised remnants, reassertions and resurgences.

Disciplinary Power
The central trope of Discipline and Punishis to contrast and separate the old ritualistic forms of sovereign power from the minutiae of the new disciplinary techniques. This theme recurs constantly throughout the text. As Foucault explains here:

«Hitherto the role of political ceremony had been to give rise to the excessive, yet regulated manifestation of power; it was a spectacular expression of potency, an ‘expenditure’, exaggerated and coded, in which power renewed its vigour. It was always more or less related to the triumph.... Discipline, however, had its own type of ceremony. It was not the triumph, but the review, the ‘parade’, an ostentatious form of the examination. In it the ‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze.» [9]
Foucault describes this new mechanism of ‘disciplinary power’ as coinciding with the birth of «an art of the human body». [10]

«What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.» [11]

Disciplinary power was spawned from and spawned in turn a whole series of techniques and knowledges of the body. Disciplinary power was to be constructed not around the spectacular ritual, but around an intricate focus on the smallest details of human life.

Andrew Neal, School of Politics, Philosophy and International Relations, Keele University

Footnotes
[1] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 35.
[2] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 42.
[3] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 35.
[4] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 42.
[5] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 47.
[6] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 48.
[7] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 48-49.
[8] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 130, my italics.
[9] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 187-188.
[10] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 138.
[11] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ibid., p. 138.

Extracted from http://www.libertysecurity.org/article203.html