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McCloskey

Thought Reform

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Hello!

The university of DDDD has a program in which you spend one semester your
sophmore year in Rome; it's a beautiful arrangement.  I had the chance to
study Art and Architecture, Literary theory, Religion, and Philosophy there. 
This was about 6 years ago when I was an undergraduate.  The school was run
by pretty liberal priests at the time (Cistercian) and whenever they would
go into Rome for meetings, Opus Dei members would come to campus and try to
convert us.  I found this very strange that they would only come when no one
"in charge" was around... I asked Dr. WXYZ who at that time was the
philosophy professor on campus what it was all about and he gave me a copy
of The Way and a book located only in England at the time, discussing the
controversial nature of Opus Dei.  He also mentioned the on-going slander
law suit between various factionsin the faculty at U.D.  back in Texas, and
that U.D. had risen to be the largest Opus Dei community in America.  He
also mentioned that he would love access to the tomb and the church in Rome
where Escriva had been buried.  He supplied us with fake names in order to
get us (another student and myself) in past the "guards" who monitored all
comings and goings at the time.  We went several floors down into the
ground, and found all kinds of businessmen laying on their faces fully
prostrated before the tomb. We were instructed to do the same.  We remained
there for half an hour, and then were led(we were escorted the entire time)
to a long hallway of confessionals in many different languages.  Finally we
were allowed to leave.  As we left, we noticed we were being followed and
took several different trains to lose our "tail"s.  Because of this
experience, I wanted to find out as much as possible when I returned to the
states about Opus Dei.  Every library book in the U.D. collection concerning
Opus dei turned out to be specially marked for monitoring who had taken it
out, and many of my friends were convinced to join groups who would go to
Russia to teach English to children there, but in fact turned out to be ways
of seperating them from their families.  I heard rumors around campus that
men and women were seperated in the Opus Dei house, that they were required
to wear a leather strap around their thigh with a sharp metal point for
punishing the flesh, and that if they rose high enough in the ranks, even if
they married they would have to remain celibate.  One friend of mine who had
become very distant dropped out at this point, and told me all of this.

I'm now a doctoral student in Psychology at XYZ University, but my
sister at U.D. has had her share of humilation and run-ins with this group. 
Regnum Christi and the Legionnaires of christ were also popular groups at
U.D. that had similar stances.

Take care, and I hope to hear more from you- do you recieve many stories 
about this?

Sincerely, XXXXXXXX