The last time Opus Dei was portrayed as a murderous, self-flagellating, power-hungry secret society of monstrous hypocrites was — you may remember — in The Da Vinci Code, first in the novel, then in the film starring Tom Hanks. Millions read the book, millions saw the film, millions decided that we were the personification of evil.
On the upside, for a few weeks the world’s media camped on our doorsteps, so we had a chance to respond. We invited the press in, gave them tea, and pointed out that we had nothing to do with the death in 1982 of Roberto Calvi (an Italian banker who died under suspicious circumstances), and that we don’t murder people or beat ourselves to a pulp with whips in orgies of unexpiated guilt. We talked about our founder, Saint Josemaria Escriva, and explained that we use the time we save not murdering folk to help Catholics to find God in their work, through a life of prayer and cultivation of the virtues, without them having to enter the cloister or become priests.
The media — including this magazine — gave us a clean bill of health. Even the tabloids had to admit that Dan Brown was wrong about Opus Dei. Of course, Opus Dei still gives some people the creeps, because mud is harder to remove than to sling. But we were more thoroughly examined than any religious organisation in history and the myths melted in the spotlight. Phew, we thought, and went back to our day jobs: retreats, theology courses, giving spiritual guidance to working people. All that sinister stuff.
So imagine how dispiriting it was when, in January last year, the BBC dragged all the old, debunked stereotypes about Opus Dei back on to the screen. And imagine how bewildered we were when, after a year of chasing through a labyrinthine process of complaints, dealing with characters just as evasive as any Da Vinci Code villain, we were eventually, last week, forced to abandon our attempts to make the BBC tell the truth.
It all started when the BBC televised a drama called Waking the Dead. It featured a self-flagellating Opus Dei assassin called Philip who kills his lover, a serial adulterer who also belongs to Opus Dei. The detectives investigate, suspecting (bravo!) Opus Dei as the link. Fraud is uncovered. The oleaginous, sanctimonious, corrupt London director of Opus Dei (who at least didn’t look like me!) stays mute when the detectives reel off as facts a list of Opus Dei ‘crimes’, not least the death of Calvi. And he expels Philip from Opus Dei, not for being a killer, but for the unpardonable sin of being found out.
What was especially annoying was that the BBC pretends to make a particular virtue of being nice to religious minorities. Its editorial guidelines state: ‘We will ensure the religious views and beliefs of an individual, a religion or a religious denomination are not misrepresented.’ So why is Opus Dei exempt?
And would the BBC really treat other religious groups in this way? Can you imagine it broadcasting a drama about the Board of Deputies of British Jews carrying out murder and fraud? The Muslim Council of Britain as money-laundering philanderers? The Salvation Army as a bunch of crooks bent on power? No, of course not.
So we complained. We wanted a little apology, that’s all, and a firm purpose of amendment: a three-second statement read at the graveyard of the news hour, perhaps, a flash of words — ‘Portrayal of Opus Dei unfair. Shall try harder next time’ — that would set the record a little straighter.
After all, a BBC guideline said that ‘the same standards of fairness which apply to factual programmes should generally be observed’, and even promised ‘to be accurate and to ensure that the drama does not unduly distort the known facts and thus become unfair’. Fiction, as every libel lawyer knows, is no defence.
Yet this was precisely the BBC’s defence over the next 18 months, as we laboured up the grievances ladder all the way to Ofcom, through ever more mysterious and circuitous routes. The programme’s producer was keen for us to know, in the first of what would be many informative letters on the Creative Process, that the programme ‘aims to tackle dark, disturbing, but hopefully fascinating subjects using fictional characters against non-fictional backdrops’. Great, we said, but what about portraying Opus Dei members as uniformly evil, and presenting as fact (Opus Dei murders Calvi) what had been disproved over and again? Isn’t the problem that your ‘non-fictional backdrop’ was defamatory and false?
But look, said the BBC, the characters’ membership of Opus Dei was ‘not necessarily contemporaneous with their misdeeds’ and see, there were other wicked characters who were not members of Opus Dei. But, we replied, unlike the other malefactors (the banks, for example, are called ‘BICF’ and ‘Levy Goldenthal’), Opus Dei is actually named. Why not call it, say, Civitas Dei, Opera Maleficium, Magnus Frater?
But in ‘highly stylised dramas such as Waking the Dead the likelihood that the audience would take it as a guide to the reality of those organisations is remote’, insisted the BBC. This sounded suspiciously like the Da Vinci Code defence, and it’s obviously untrue. An opinion poll in 2006 showed that readers of Dan Brown were four times more likely than non-readers to believe Opus Dei regularly murders people.
And the main point, surely, was that BBC guidelines state that fictional dramas have the same duty to fairness as non-fiction.
The Editorial Complaints Unit took that question ‘Very Seriously’. Yes, dramas have an obligation to fairness, to portray people and their organisations realistically, they explained; but that obligation was strongest in the case of a drama documentary and rather less strong in a ‘highly fictionalised format’ such as Waking the Dead, in which ‘unlikely conspiracies, guilty secrets and unexpected revelations are the order of the day’.
In April 2007 we took our four letters and the replies to the BBC Trust, the new body set up in the wake of the Hutton inquiry to deal with complaints and grievances. The Trust said it would get back to us soon — and it did, with an impressive 24-page bundle to which we were invited to add more documents. Although we threw in authoritative media reports debunking the Calvi accusations, in its judgment the Trust informed us that Opus Dei’s fraudulent bank deals and murders ‘was accurate in terms of media coverage’. The last was an entirely new justification, one to make a libel judge blanch: that if a newspaper somewhere has made an preposterous, defamatory allegation, it is fine to reproduce it as fact — at least in a drama using shaky camera techniques.
So we turned, eyes rolling when not cast heavenwards, to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. While the BBC had taken our complaint seriously and dealt with it swiftly, even if they were determined to see it off, Ofcom met our September 2007 submission with a magnum silentium unbroken until mid-December, when the complaint was thrown out as ‘frivolous’. We had ten days to appeal and did, pointing out the holes in their arguments and the violation of Ofcom’s own Rule 7.10 on fairness, which was just like the BBC’s.
Fair point, said Ofcom in February; we’ll look again. Another silentium. Then, last week, with all the furious arrogance of a Dan Brown villain, Ofcom threw out the complaint again.
‘Ofcom considered that there were a number of indicators given to viewers that the programme was a fictional drama and was intended to be viewed in that context,’ we were told. After 18 months and a pile of documents of Da Vinci Code length and tedium, with nowhere left to appeal, our questions still hang in the air. Why is it OK for the BBC to misrepresent an innocent religious organisation? And who Ofcoms Ofcom?
Mysterium magnum.
Jack Valero Is A UK Director Of Opus Dei.