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Irish Times
11-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Recruited to Opus Dei at age 15: ‘I don't think I've ever come to terms with the enormity of what happened to me'
When Anne Marie Allen was fifteen she was accepted into a catering college with dreams of becoming a chef. Instead she was tricked into a life of domestic servitude with Opus Dei, an institution of the Catholic Church that was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá. Allen worked part time in a local hotel in Ballyvourney Co Cork when two women arrived to her family home saying that they were interviewing for a free catering course. The women said that Allen would receive pocket money of five pounds a week and a job guaranteed by the end of the two year course. This meeting began the 6 year long ordeal chronicled in Allen's memoir Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei . In this episode of The Women's Podcast, the Cork author discusses her experience. READ MORE After a few weeks Allen began to notice 'there didn't seem to be any catering teachers there. There were members of Opus Dei.' These members of Opus Dei were known as 'the local council, the directors, the sub directors, and the Secretary. 'But none of them seemed to have qualifications in catering,' adds Allen. As a teenager she cooked, served, ironed, washed, scrubbed for the members of Opus Dei. 'Not long after I joined, maybe a couple of months, I was called up into the director's bedroom, and she gave me this little bag, and I opened it up, and there was a chain, a kind of barbed wire with two cords in it and a whip. 'She said, 'these are for mortification',' recalls Allen. Allen says that she was told to wear the chain on her leg for two hours every day, and on occasion for an extra hour a day depending on behaviour. The whip was used 'on your back, your legs or your bum'. 'There was other mortifications as well,' says Allen, including but not limited to sleeping on the floor without a mattress, sleeping without a pillow and cold showers. 'They were obsessed with the idea of temptation, of temptation and sin, the occasion of sin,' she says. However, 'the chain and whip were nothing in comparison fraternal correction,' says Anne Marie. 'Fraternal correction as it was marketed to us was a way of helping us improve our spiritual life and and how to become more aligned to the perfect member of Opus Dei. But what it was a form of behavior control'. Fraternal corrections were verbal reprimands from your peers based on conduct. 'You were only supposed to get one a week but I remember getting two a day'. Although Allen says that she is in a 'good place now', she says she will 'always be recovering' from her time in Opus Dei. 'I don't think I've ever come to terms with the enormity of what happened to me and what happened to us all. I know. I don't think I'll ever get over it. I will never stop fighting to correct it'. You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Irish Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei: ‘Catholicism on cocaine'
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. READ MORE 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.
