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Opus Dei and Iese: a matter of faith
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Jeremy Hazlehurst DECEMBER 2 2010
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The smell of incense hangs in the air. A priest stands at the lectern, leafing through a Bible in front of a modernist relief of religious scenes. A common enough sight in Spain or any other country, perhaps, except that this chapel is at the heart of one of the world’s most respected business schools. It is also at the centre of efforts by one of the Catholic Church’s most conservative movements to inject Christian principles into global capitalism.
With its flashy conference rooms and international students and faculty, Iese in Barcelona is every bit the modern business school. Its MBA course is, according to the FT’s ranking, among the best in the world. But what sets Iese apart is that it is run by Opus Dei, the Catholic organisation best known in the English-speaking world for its starring role in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, where it is depicted as a group of self-flagellating religious fanatics who secretly control the world.
Since Iese was founded in 1958 – as part of the University of Navarra, which also teaches law and journalism – Opus Dei has launched further technical colleges and business schools. It recently helped set one up in Lagos, Nigeria, and earlier this year unveiled a new campus in Manhattan. Further expansion into Latin America, eastern Europe and Africa is in the pipeline.
Other business schools have religious affiliations, of course. Esade, just down the road from Iese in Barcelona, was set up by the Jesuits. In the US, schools such as the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, and the Catholic Boston College also have a Christian flavour.
Iese stands apart for its sheer quality – but why is it so good? And what part does its religious affiliation play?
Some view the schools as promotional vehicles for Opus Dei, founded in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá, a devout priest and the son of a Catalan textiles merchant, who was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 2002.
Inspired by the philosophy that people should aspire to holiness in their work and ordinary activities, Opus Dei members attend mass every day. Some practise mortification of the flesh, wearing a cilice, a band that fits around the leg and is designed to cause pain. There are grades of member: supernumeraries, who make up 70 per cent of the group, live in their own homes and are often married and employed; numeraries, about 20 per cent of the group, are celibate and live in Opus Dei residences.
John Allen, an American Catholic journalist, has described Opus Dei as the “Guinness Extra Stout of the Catholic Church” – “a strong brew, definitely an acquired taste and clearly not for everyone” that “enjoys a cult following among purists who respect it because it never wavers”.
But how does it influence the world’s budding business elite? Domènec Melé is an Opus Dei priest who has been a professor of business ethics at Iese for a quarter of a century. He explains that an involvement with business is central to the group’s whole mission. “Opus Dei is basically about sanctifying ordinary life, including work and the family,” he says. “It helps people develop in a Christian sense in everyday life, including business.”
The point of Opus Dei is that you do not have to become a priest or a monk to honour God. You can do it through your work, whether you are a banker, a taxi driver or a housewife.
Prof Melé joined the group when he was 18, and worked as an engineer before he was “called”, as he puts it. Iese’s mission is not to recruit people to Opus Dei, he says, but “to humanise business” by teaching business leaders to consider the human impact of their actions.
He says teachers do not spin an Opus Dei line; and unlike at the University of Navarra, where theology is a required course for lawyers, there is no Catholic flavour to classes.
There is an obvious Opus Dei presence at the school – men in clerical collars wander past as you eat lunch – but it is low-key. Iese alumni say they barely noticed it, but one student told me “there is a universe of Christianity there if you want it”.
I met a Japanese convert who regularly goes on Iese retreats, while an Indian student attended English-language mass in the school’s chapels.
One student showed me a handout that arrived monthly from the college’s chaplaincy. It included an excerpt from a speech given by the pope and a list of masses, confessions, religious festivals and saint’s days – a lure, but a safely ignorable one.
Yet opponents say the schools are glorified recruitment centres, criticise Opus Dei’s ultra-conservative world view and call its members hypocrites for claiming to be Christians while often enriching themselves.
John Roche, a fellow of Linacre College in Oxford and a former Opus Dei member, calls it “an Orwellian world employing much doublethink and internal and external deception”, and “virtually a cult or sect in spirit, a law unto itself, almost totally self-centred”.
Dianne DiNicola, who founded the Opus Dei Awareness Network after her daughter joined the group at university, accuses it of “brainwashing” young people and “love-bombing” potential recruits.
Then there is its influence on politics, business and the judiciary in Spain and Latin America. Opus Dei members tend to come from wealthy, conservative families and have been accused of promoting reactionary ideas and the interests of other members through personal contacts.
Opus Dei strongly denies all these allegations.
The students I spoke to said there were a handful of Opus Dei members in their year of more than 200, adding that they felt no pressure to join. Indeed, with an average age of 27 and several years of work behind them, the MBA students are probably beyond the impressionable stage. The group’s influence on classes largely consists of teaching students that “as a business leader your job is to improve the world and not just make profit”, as one student put it.
Iese’s own finances are certainly in fine shape: its endowment is worth roughly €20m ($27m), although this is paltry compared with Harvard’s $28bn. Like any business school, it is supported by businesses. Its 2008-09 annual report lists more than 100 companies that support it, including PwC, Barclays, Nissan and Rothschild. Then there are the fees: the 200 students on the two-year MBA this year each paid €87,000. Many Iese staff also donate part of their salary to the school, which had a total income of about €77m for 2009-10.
Opus Dei is also wealthy, although again its fortune is small compared with the Catholic Church as a whole; Allen, the journalist, calculated Opus Dei’s worldwide assets stood at roughly $2.8bn in 2005.
The public face of Opus Dei in the UK is Spanish-born Jack Valero. He joined the organisation at the age of 16 and went on to set up his own software firm, before retiring and devoting his life to Opus Dei.
“We love the world of business because it makes people happier and gives them a better life,” he says. “It’s good that people should improve their standard of living. If you are poor and you spend your life working out how you are going to eat the next day, it is difficult to pray. That’s why we must resolve poverty as fast as we can – so that people can have a relationship with God.”
There is “no Catholic way of doing business”, he explains. In his business life he always behaved with “honesty and integrity”. But apart from that it did not change the way he acted, he says.
Ella Leonard, a lawyer in London, became a member 17 years ago. She says there is “no grand conspiracy” that explains why people connected with Opus Dei are successful. That they offer their work to God spurs them on to do a good job, she says.
“It would be odd to offer God something half-baked. If you are trying to do your best, for God, then you are likely to be promoted and do well,” she adds.
Pedro Videla, a professor of economics at the school who describes himself as “liberal in the European sense”, says that when he tells people that he works for an organisation run by Opus Dei, they reply: “Are you nuts? Do you whip yourself?” His initial instinct was that there was no influence, but he has come to recognise that it does make a difference.
“If you look at the buildings and infrastructure, this school should be ranked 50th in the world, but we are always in the top 10,” he says. “The reason is that we care about the students. They spend hours talking to us; they are our priority.
“The first time I came here to look around 15 years ago, the dean met me. On the way to his office he was cleaning up cigarette butts from the floor, turning off the lights and saying hello to everybody. That shows what this school stands for – we respect other people.”
This principle permeates everything that happens at Iese, he says. “If a student has lost his temper with anybody … then he is told we don’t like that kind of behaviour. The influence of Opus Dei is not that everybody should go to mass at midday; it is about the way that people interact.”
Others remain unconvinced. Opus Dei, they argue, is too clever to be caught openly recruiting. And for a group that purports to value education, it has an eyebrow-raising attitude to literature, and publishes an exhaustive list of books for which permission is needed to read, in some cases from Rome. These include works by writers such as Martin Amis and Anthony Burgess and philosophers including Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as novels by Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper.
Perhaps there is some fishing for souls at Iese. Maybe members do promote each other’s business interests. And if there is a contradiction in claiming to live a non-materialistic life while making money, it could be seen as an attempt by the Church to persuade middle-class people that they do not have to forego religion as they become wealthier.
For all that, notions of respect, honesty, integrity and the idea that business should consider the human consequences of decisions sound like principles that should underpin any business decision. In a world where inequality is rife and greed is often depicted as good, a little bit of Guinness might not be such a bad thing.
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