Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei: ‘Catholicism on cocaine'

Irish Times

18-06-2025

Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei
Author
:
Anne Marie Allen
ISBN-13
:
978-1804582862
Publisher
:
Gill Books
Guideline Price
:
€18.99
Young Anne Marie Allen thought
Robert Redford
was 'a fine bit of stuff altogether'. She inadvertently swore while watching her native
Cork
lose the 1982 All-Ireland
hurling
final on television. She wondered aloud why no money could be found to replace her only pair of shoes when the soles started flapping off.
For all these 'mortal sins', Allen's strikingly angry memoir recalls, the
Opus Dei
members who had made her their unpaid skivvy warned that she and her family were on a one-way road to hell.
Opus Dei has often been depicted as a sinister cult, most notoriously in Dan Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code, which accuses its murderous leaders of suppressing Jesus Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene. Serve's key message, however, is that the global Catholic organisation's brainwashing techniques can also damage lives on a much more mundane level.
In plain, forceful prose, Allen explains how a modest village childhood in 1970s
Ballyvourney
left her ripe for exploitation. The headstrong 15-year-old hotel worker and her friend were seduced by an alluring newspaper advert: 'Cookery school, Galway, no fee, job guaranteed.' At Ballyglunin Park, she soon discovered that her new reality involved constantly preparing meals and washing clothes for Opus Dei's lofty 'numeraries' while receiving zero education or wages.
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Allen's anguished account suggests she suffered a severe case of Stockholm syndrome. 'You have a vocation as big as a house,' she was repeatedly told, persuading her to adopt a drab, lonely regime she wryly calls 'Catholicism on cocaine'.
She describes a litany of physical and psychological abuse, including being ordered to self-flagellate with a cilice (a spiked wire) that bit into her thigh for up to two hours a day. The story ends relatively happily with Allen leaving after six torrid years to forge a successful career in the Irish Prison Service, but she accepts that the mental scars from her own captivity may 'never fully heal'.
Serve has some limitations. Allen often reconstructs decades-old conversations word-for-word, a technique that adds immediacy but feels deeply artificial. Today she is pioneering an international campaign of ex-Opus Dei domestic servants who want redress from the Vatican, but there is disappointingly little detail about that here.
Allen's unvarnished testimony still makes for an urgent, powerful memoir – and a timely reminder that Pope Leo (who reportedly views Opus Dei benignly) has inherited a church with many sins left to confess.