The Work, quite clearly, works. Primarily, I would say, at developing the spiritual life of those it touches. But for the most part, Opus Dei members seem to me as healthy, non-fanatical, and ordinary as any average group of Catholics who take their spiritual lives seriously. The young people in particular seem both happy and happy to have found a solidly Catholic group that encourages them to live good lives in the world of today. I mention these personal impressions only because these two new books on the Work one favorable, the other very much not are themselves personal evaluations of experience with Opus Dei.
Nothing attracts criticism like success.
In the seventy years since its founding, the Work has grown to almost eighty thousand members, over half in Europe, another third in the Americas, and the rest scattered throughout the world. As Vittorio Messori notes, this movement, which was once thought of as a pre-Vatican II fossil by progressives, has not only survived the heyday of progressive Catholic movements, but continues growing while the left in general, religious and lay, is shrinking. That used to be the cry of the progressives themselves. Opus Dei came into the world at an unpropitious moment. Under the circumstances, the movement might have emerged from the Civil War embittered about secular democracy and committed to restoration and reaction.