BUENOS AIRES (AP).— A team of Argentine prosecutors concluded that there are well-founded suspicions to initiate a criminal investigation against the highest authorities of Opus Dei in South America, between 1983 and 2015, for the crimes of human trafficking and labor exploitation against at least 44 women recruited by the religious order to perform domestic tasks in their residences.
The accusations fall on those who served in that period as Vicar or Regional Counselor of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia: Carlos Nannei (1991-1997), Patricio Olmos (1998-2014) and Víctor Urtizarrazu (2014-2022).
The Regional Secretary, in charge of the Women’s Section, Gabriel Dondo, who held the position until 2015, was also charged.
In the same document to which AP had access, prosecutors Eduardo Taiano, head of a National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor’s Office, and María Alejandra Mángano and Marcelo Colombo, co-heads of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Prosecutor’s Office, asked federal judge Daniel Rafecas “please summon them to give an investigative statement.”
Opus Dei (Work of God in Latin) was founded by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer in 1928. It is present in about 70 countries and has 90,000 members. The group, which was widely favored by Pope John Paul II, who canonized Escrivá in 2002, has a unique status in the Church and reports directly to the Pontiff. Many of its members are lay people and women with secular jobs and families who seek to “sanctify ordinary life,” while other members are priests and celibate lay people.
Based on a complaint filed in 2022, the team of prosecutors began an investigation that concluded that from the early 1970s until 2015, “people occupying different hierarchies within Opus Dei established a structure dedicated to the recruitment of at least 44 women, most of them girls and adolescents, to be subjected to living conditions comparable to servitude under the designation of ‘auxiliary numeraries’.”
This is what women dedicated to household chores and who comply with celibacy are called.
“False accusation”
“We categorically deny the accusations of human trafficking and labor exploitation,” said the communications office of the Prelature of Opus Dei in Argentina. “The impression is that to construct this complaint, a complete decontextualization of the training received by some of the women in the group and the vocation freely chosen by the auxiliary numeraries of Opus Dei is carried out. “This is a totally false accusation.”
Prosecutors detailed that Opus Dei selected low-income girls and adolescents, usually from rural areas far from the organization’s activity centers, and that they were recruited “under the promise of receiving training and improving their job prospects.”
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