Meet the Real Red Hats

The Powerful Religious Sect Behind U.S. Court-Packing and Project 2025

Every time I think the members of the religious right can’t really be that nuts, I learn something that moves the line. JD Vance’s ravings about the psychopathy and inherent civic worthlessness of single cat ladies are just the tip of the iceberg.

Take, for example, his friend, admirer, and conservative influencer Rod Dreher, a one-time Catholic convert who played a small role in shepherding seeker JD into Catholicism. Dreher himself had found the Catholic church “too feminized” for his spiritual needs and so, converted to Orthodox Christianity, a sect to which Putin belongs, and moved to Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s white nationalism felt more amenable than American heterogeneity. The Christian Orthodoxy pod of the Slavic world, he has stated “manages to be a masculine expression of Christianity without being macho.” (A stellar apostle of that un-macho masculinity would be the late, glamorously be-robed Russian Orthodox cleric who called live-in girlfriends “unpaid prostitutes.”)

Yesterday we learned that Kevin Roberts, the cosplaying Y’all Qaeda coal roller truck driving, Lucchese cowboy boot-wearing president of the Heritage Foundation whose Project 2025 preaches the centrality of “the family” as the foundation of American society, a foundation to be achieved in part by forcing impregnated incest and rape victims to give birth, is so far astray from the teachings of Jesus that he reportedly once bragged about killing a neighbors’ dog with a shovel.

This month, these men and other weird characters are more on my mind as I researched an article for New York Magazine about the power moves of a curious, self-flagellating Catholic organization that exists today at the red-hot center of the judicial and right-wing donor world in Washington D.C.

Opus Dei hasn’t attracted much attention since 2006, when Dan Brown’s mega-hit Da Vinci Code was released as a movie starring Tom Hanks chased by a psychotic Opus Dei albino monk operating under orders from a priest hiding a millennia-old dark religious secret. The Da Vinci Code was a literary salad of Christian conspiracy theories and Western art history symbolism, tossed up with some of the actual lurid practices of the Opus Dei cult into a confusing, colorful plot. The book remains one of the biggest sellers in publishing history. And not since the vomit-flecked, Latin-spewing film The Exorcist had a movie sparked such global interest in the lore and peculiarities of hardcore Catholicism.

The book and movie made much of some of the bizarre practices of a cult run by red-hatted Vatican priests in embroidered heavy robes, with special attention to its practice of encouraging members to strap the “cilice” a nail-embedded garter onto a thigh and beat themselves for two hours a week with a whip Opus Dei calls “The Discipline.”

A new book by British financial journalist Gareth Gore, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church (Simon & Schuster; October 1) traces the history of Opus Dei from its founding by a Spanish priest, now sainted, Josemaría Escrivá who founded the sect in 1928, as a global network of lay Catholics. Over the decades, the sect was tied to fascist dictators in Latin and Central America and was sullied by involvement in a scandalous bank failure, Spain’s Banco Popular. Escriva’s goal was to infiltrate and influence not the masses, but elites, as a route to “re-Christianizing” human society.

Today, as Gore lays out in the last third of his book, Opus Dei has achieved influence at the highest echelon of American power. The organization has been increasingly active in Washington since at least the early 1990s when it set up shop at 15th and K — the heart of the capital lobbying industry. From there, one of its priests (wearing a spiked garter under his robes to restrict his bodily urges) converted at least a half dozen of the top right-wingers in Washington to the Opus Dei brand of regressive Catholicism. Among his converts — future Trump administration National Economic Advisor Larry Kudlow, and other men in the highest echelons of American law and government — future House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Senator Sam Brownback, failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and many other leaders who found themselves in need to priestly guidance.

Some of the most powerful figures in American politics and political finance today have Opus Dei connections. One of the most effective Opus Dei-affiliated Catholics in DC today is Leonard Leo, bagman for rightist billionaires, who spent decades working to capture the federal judiciary for the anti-choice movement. Five of the six members of the right side of the Supreme Court are right-wing Catholic — Chief Justice Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh who replaced Opus Dei adjacent Antonin Scalia after Mitch McConnell refused to let Obama fill his vacancy for almost a year. These modern-day priest-kings have been working to force American law into line with a creed most Americans — including the vast majority of Catholics — reject — all under the guise of “religious freedom.”

Opus Dei has been beavering away inside DC for a while but the organization and its members and allies are more visible now because the historic assault on American women’s health care has succeeded. At least a half dozen Opus Dei affiliated organizations are on the advisory board of Project 2025 and Leonard Leo-affiliated groups have poured at least $50 million into the Project, according to calculations by the political research nonprofit Accountable U.S. 

The 900-plus-page manifesto is infused with Opus Dei goals and even language. Kevin Roberts’ foreword includes phrases and concepts straight out of the writings of Opus Dei founder Escriva, including revising the words of the Declaration of Independence to “pursuit of Blessedness” from the pursuit of happiness, defining liberty as “the freedom to do not what we want but what we ought,” and using the term “Human Flourishing” — the name of an Opus Dei program at Harvard.

Opus Dei’s network extends throughout right-wing Washington, although it’s not possible to know how many are actual members and how many are simply fellow travelers. The names of members, called “numeraries” if single and “supernumeraries” if married, are not public. But some links are not hidden. Beyond Leonard Leo and his minions on the high court, current and former Washington power lawyers and influencers serve or have served on the board of the Opus Dei Center. Board chairman Brian Svoboda is a partner with Perkins Coie. Former board members include Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Kirkland & Ellis partner Thomas Yannuci, anti-feminist Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, and writer Mary Eberstadt have all served on its board. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba’s father, Saab Habba, like Leonard Leo, is also a Knight of Malta.

The once reliable country club Republican Heritage Foundation — an establishment think tank since the 1970s — is allied with Opus Dei through its president Roberts. Roberts is a Louisiana-born conservative Catholic. Before coming to Washington a few years ago, he served, among other conservative network posts, as head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (it lobbies against climate change science and its donors include a variety of right-wing think tanks, as well as Chevron and Exxon). Before that, he was president of a Catholic college in Wyoming that hatched out culture warrior kids who would complain to local shops about the impropriety of advertising bras on mannequins (“upsetting to male students”) and who held anti-LGBTQ “traditional marriage picnics.” While still in his home state Louisiana, he founded John Paul the Great Academy, which officially considers Opus Dei founder Escrivá its “patron”.

Many of the DC Opus Dei players, including Vance, have boarded jets west to attend seminars at California magnate Tim Busch’s Napa Institute (Busch also grows grapes and his Trinitas Cellars produces reds named after iterations of the Virgin Mary). Busch made his fortune as an attorney in Orange County, California, specializing in “high net-worth estate planning, real estate and business transactions, tax, and religious organization representation” and has become one of hard right Catholicism’s most powerful supporters and promoters.

No list of networked hard-right medievally-nostalgic Catholics in Washington would be complete without currently incarcerated Steve Bannon, an unrepentant crusader who is not, as far as is known, Opus Dei, but who shares the sect’s pugnacious anti-liberal Christianity. He decorates his “war room” set with a framed Jesus painting and icons of saints. After Trump’s win in 2016 raised his profile and bankability, Bannon tried to start a rightwing Catholic political academy in an 800-year-old abbey near Rome, the Certosa di Trisulti, Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI) that could serve as a “gladiator school” for Judeo Christian nationalists. 

Working on the Opus Dei story and interviewing Gore, I came to understand that while the white evangelical voting bloc that the political right relies on to stay in power is Protestant, the most effective wielders of that power in DC today are hard-right Catholics - many with Oous Dei connections.

Randall Balmer is a Dartmouth professor of religion who has studied how and why their power is on the rise within the larger religious right. “White evangelicals or the religious right more generally outsourced its political thinking to conservative Catholics because evangelicals didn’t have a deep bench of intellectuals,” he told me. “So, these conservative Catholics essentially serve as a proxy for evangelicals because evangelicals didn’t have the intellectual heft or tradition to make them remotely qualified, where the Catholic tradition goes back to Augustine and Aquinas — this long rich tradition that has been appropriated by conservatives in my view.”

That august history is one of the aspects Vance has said attracted him. “I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old,” Vance said at a 2021 conference of the Napa Institute. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed ten years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe ten years later.” 

The success of Opus Dei’s long game in DC coincides with a rising presence on American elite university campuses (Ipus Dei houses have been in Stanford and Princeton campuses for years but the organization is moving onto many other Ivies now). The appeal of the brand of conservative Catholicism among Millenials like Vance is growing. Bari Weiss’ Free Press just published a feature on the growing trend among a cohort of younger Catholic women to don the veil or lace “mantilla” to Mass. “I always carry my veil, my phone, my keys, my wallet,” one young woman, a California native living in New York, who converted to Catholicism in 2016, told the reporter.

After decades in which Catholic priests have been exposed by the thousands here and abroad as predatory pedophiles abusing hundreds of thousands of children worldwide, and as more Americans are leaving the Catholic church than joining it — by as much as six to one — how is it that the influence of this extremely conservative sect is rising in Washington? It’s possible that in the tumult of rapid social and technological change of this historical moment, Martin Luther’s direct line to God — the essence of Protestant Christianity — doesn’t offer comfort like it once did to American Puritans. To an uneasy flock, perhaps direct revelation is trailer park Christianity, too easily blown away by the howling force of the chaos of our era.

To these anxious seekers, radical right Catholicism might represent a new version of a very old and rock-solid fortress. Even so, it’s difficult to fathom how modern American political actors fall in with a tradition that believes in miracles, Satan, and exorcism and is still plagued with scandalous revelations about the predations of countless pedophiliac priests.

The lure of woo in a secular society can’t be overstated. Vance was coaxed and converted by a variety of Opus Dei-connected characters, but he has suggested an element of miracle nudged him toward Rome. “There were some weird coincidences that hastened my decision,” he has written, including an uncanny moment — a sign — during a bar stool discussion about whether to convert or not. “Suddenly a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front of us. We both stared at each other in silence for a bit, a little startled by what we’d just seen, before ending our conversation abruptly and excusing ourselves to turn in for the night.”

Meanwhile, the number of exorcism requests in the US is rising so dramatically that the Vatican has had to increase the number of specialist priests in America from 12 in 2005 to around 150 today. A book explaining exorcism was translated into English in 2017, for the first time since it was published in the early 17th century. “The inescapable question is: Why? Or rather: Why now? Why, in our modern age are so many people turning to the Church for help in banishing corporeal fiends from their body,” wrote Michael Mariani, in a long piece about the phenomenon in the Atlantic a few years ago. “And what does this resurgent interest tell us about the figurative demons tormenting contemporary society?”

Fear of the devil, though, is not the heart of the enterprise. The devil’s earthly assistants — women — are the real enemy. The core of Trumpism, is, of course, misogyny. Opus Dei would seem to be exactly the kind of elite cult that would set off conspiracy and paranoia among MAGAs. But its rejection of women’s bodily and economic independence is a shared tenet with the larger extremist right.

Opus Dei’s official stance regarding women is that they exist to be wives and mothers. “In the care she takes of her husband and children, a woman fulfills the most indispensable part of her mission.” Founder Josémaria Escriva’s words in the last century remain as doctrine for the sect.

Stanford’s one-time Opus Dei representative, Father Arne Panula, a friend of Peter Thiel, who later spent years as “regional spiritual director” at the Opus Dei headquarters in DC, put the OD view of the status of women this way: “What we call feminism is the attempt to flee both of the punishments handed to Eve: the pain of procreation and the pain of turning to men for approval and self-esteem. … In the Garden of Eden, the sexes enjoy parity. … Then Eve, thanks to the serpent, puts Adam into the unfortunate predicament of having to choose between his girl and God. ….Feminism of the kind we’ve known for decades — the hard-driving feminism of a Margaret Sanger, a Gloria Steinem, etc. — is coming from exactly that attempt to restore the parity of Eden. But the trouble is, you can’t do it by making a woman more like a man. That’s the terrible irony of widespread abortion and contraception.”

This is the lunatic baggage that right-wing tool Donald Trump hauls around with him, as he soaks in donor money and lies about his links to Project 2025 and the national abortion ban that is next on the to-do list of the intellectual religious right (soon-to-be followed by the end of loathed gay marriage). 

Here, last week, is what passes for Trump's outreach to 51 percent of the U.S. population:

Note: Parts of the above appeared in last week’s online issue of New York Magazine, You can read a much more extensive history of Opus Dei’s network and its work in Washington at this link on New York Magazine. The article is paywalled, but if you buy my novel I’ll share a PDF.