An article too funny to pass up

I was googling recent Web postings for "Opus Dei" and ran across an article from the UK that caught my eye: "Opus Dei is so normal it's scary." In the May issue of the Spectatator, Mary Wakefield investigates Opus Dei hoping to find something terribly odd, only to discover people so well balanced she eventually got bored.

The entire article is to long to include, so I've chosen a few choice excerpts. My thinking is that if jaded british journalists find little to excite, that alone is a strong enough defense indeed.

"After three hours with Opus Dei women at Ashwell House in east London I wandered west, half-stunned, like a cat hit by a car. At Oxford Circus the usual loons were saving souls: ‘Repent now, turn to God!’ from a woman on the south side. From a north-end traffic island, megaphone man provided the antiphonal response: ‘Seek salvation before it is too late!’ And in my pocket my mobile, ringing with a message from an Opus Dei publicity man. ‘Hi there! When you’re finished at Ashwell House, come to Notting Hill to have tea with Sebastian. He’s a supernumerary and he plays the cello! I think it’s important that you meet him.’
Maybe, but I wasn’t sure I could. I’d had enough. It wasn’t that Opus Dei had been unexpectedly sinister or murderous, like Silas, the anti-hero of The Da Vinci Code — after all, St Josemariá Escrivá beat himself till he bled, so I’d been expecting, hoping for, gothic. It wasn’t even that they were sallow and enigmatic, like Ruth Kelly, Opus Dei’s representative in the Cabinet. Instead, the members I’d met had been so mysteriously well-balanced and comfortable in their skins as to be actually frightening. If I had to sustain eye contact with another well-adjusted, devout young Catholic, I thought I might start swearing, or crying."

"Ashwell House was quiet, the walls a startling salmon pink, and my first impression of Sam and Eileen was of a quieter version of television’s Trinny and Susannah, the hosts of What Not to Wear. Sam, dark-haired, in a high-collared red chiffon shirt; Eileen, blonde, made-up, in a V-neck lined with sequins. After a quick tour of the premises, ‘a good environment for clean-living students’, we settled in a common room for coffee and life stories. ‘I was an Anglican,’ said Sam, ‘at a little CofE school, but my experience of Anglicanism was of nice middle-class ladies in hats going to church on a Sunday, and I wasn’t satisfied. I thought, there must be an objective truth, and this isn’t doing credit to it."

"Then I met a Catholic girl who seemed to be cheerful and great fun, and started going to meetings with her. She was in Opus Dei, so I went to classes, then joined as a numerary.’ Simple! She smiles. How could you be sure this was your vocation? ‘I wasn’t!’ said Sam. ‘It’s more like being in love and deciding to get married — everything points in the same direction, it all makes sense and there’s a feeling of tremendous happiness.’"

"I liked Opus because I met people who were young, vibrant, sporty,’ she said. ‘To be honest, all the Catholics I’d met before had been old and nice but, you know, not like me.’ She laughed. ‘Now if I feel like a big fat load of zeros, I remember I’ve got Christ in front of me and I can do anything!"

"Everyone seemed well turned out, clever, devout, but where were the regular messed-up folk? Where were Dan Brown’s freaks, his everyday weirdos? "

"Before I left, Sam admitted that the hype around The Da Vinci Code sometimes got her down. ‘It’s been a great opportunity for us but also difficult,’ she said. ‘We’ve been afraid of the press in the past, but we’re beginning to realise that not all journalists are out to get you. Some of them,’ she said cautiously, ‘can be normal human beings."