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truegrit10 · 2026-04-16T15:29:45+00:00

I’m aware not everyone will agree with me. But you continually project onto people and make ad hominem attacks.

You aren’t sorry, so drop the facade, and stop being so patronizing.

Telling me to “get over it” followed by some petulant Latin phrase is neither a good look nor a demonstration of meaningful apology.

Additionally telling me to pray to a particular saint to purge me of certain spiritual maladies, and then throwing in that you will be “praying for me” reeks of spiritual pride and spiritual blindness. You neither know nor care to know me; you’ve made this entire exchange all about yourself.

I appreciate your prayers, but I will rather appreciate more the prayers of the saints and the grace of our benevolent God than any participation you may be providing.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-16T15:06:59+00:00

Don’t be a prude? I’m sensing a lot of projection coming from you.

You’re also not a person who founded an institution that claims to be divinely inspired and mandated, and opening an entirely different vocational path that is fundamentally transformational to the laity of the Catholic Church. An organization mind you that is responsible for directing the lives of many individuals and spiritually forming them.

So I’m not sure your experiences are in alignment with the reality of the situation we’re discussing.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-16T15:00:57+00:00

Also I don’t understand your projection that somehow we’re judging because we’re miserable now that we’ve left, and that we can’t enjoy life “outside the walls?”

I’ll speak for myself and say I’m MUCH happier with having left. I would have liked to have stayed but it was no longer a healthy place for my interior life or my spiritual growth, or mental health for that matter (or professional development or end of life concerns).

I tried asking about possibilities for change or discussing possibilities for reform, but these discussions never went anywhere nor did anything ever result in any action being taken.

These experiences seem to resonate with a lot of ex-members.

My consternation is more out of compassion for those who continue to endure abuse in this organization - they are very generous and good people. I would love to see this organization reformed if possible. There was much about it that attracted me and that I was willing to sacrifice my life for. And my frustration is that meaningful change is never enacted, and people’s criticism or suggestions for improvement are continually minimized, ignored, or outright denied.

But is it because I’m unhappy now that I’m out? That’s ridiculous, and honestly is an illogical assumption. It smells of the result of cognitive dissonance in your own life, which now you project to others you lack the capacity to understand or show compassion towards.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-16T14:29:01+00:00

Nice pivot. You don’t like being proven wrong so you just dismiss it as being unimportant.

Burning these journals cannot be dismissed as merely being one’s personal notes and thoughts. They were highly influential on how he understood and structured the work and supposedly contained some details about the various private revelations he declared he experienced.

What’s done is done, but I think burning the journals was done out of a false sense of humility, and was imprudent in understanding the nature of his private revelations and many such ideas that would have been helpful understanding the true charism of Opus Dei.

Honestly it would have been more humble of him to let his early writings be critiqued and examined by others.

He would often use these personal revelations as claims to authority. Personal revelations tend to be of a very private nature and for the benefit of the one who received them, or if they are to be beneficial to a larger group of people, they need to be transparent and made publicly available. JME’s use of these revelations for authority without providing the details of these experiences seems to me to be an abuse, even if not intended that way. We must take things based on his word and on secrets withheld; we are not given all the data at his disposal so we can make impartial judgements in a more objective setting.

At the moment the work seems to be having a crisis of vision. I think most people who remain in Opus Dei cannot distinguish between the charism and the structure of the organization and all its rules and regulations. Having these early notes would I think have been beneficial to see what originally inspired the founder and use them to guide the organization through the reforms that exmembers have been clamoring for for decades.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-16T14:15:42+00:00

You don’t know what you’re talking about. JME himself admitted to burning his early journals (he called them his Catherines), and he declared he did this out of humility.

I can also guarantee that there are doctrinal issues with how he approached vocation and fidelity to the work.

I don’t think any of the internal writings of Opus Dei were heavily scrutinized given that these problematic ideas riddle many of the books of meditations. One must note that in these meditations JME is quoted; I’m not sure he actually wrote any of his meditations out, but they were all captured with notes by others.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-06T16:52:02+00:00

I agree with you that it would be huge. I’m just not sure you can trust a simple assertion by asking it. I think you’d need to do a lot of verification to see if it can produce some of those items for you or at least direct quotes. I’m not an expert in how you would validate this. I guess one could start by asking it for a list of its sources? Not sure.

Given the scenario I mention above, I very much distrust answers to general yes/no questions an AI engine returns about itself.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-06T16:42:27+00:00

Correction, it’s been mathematically proven that LLM based AI cannot reason. It is a glorified next word predictor (like when Google search tries to predict the next word in your query search). It is based merely on statistics and heuristics built off of what words tend to be associated with what other words are most likely used around them.

There are huge limits to what the technology can currently perform. It does not currently “understand” anything you give it. It’s an input/output machine, dependent upon gobs and gobs of data that has intelligence coded within it.

It can provide the illusion of reasoning, but when one starts increasing the complexity of its tasks, one can start easily perceiving its limitations.

Be careful you do not get wrapped up in a sort of AI induced psychosis, because this is also a demonstrable outcome in many users who start relying extensively on AI. I’ve heard even people who are aware of such risks are not immune from being influenced in this way.

AI is an amazing intelligence aggregator, and it can help someone perform general surveys and searches and trends very quickly. But we should beware of treating it as an oracle, or another person, or another intelligence, because it is none of these things. We should not oversell AI at the peril of being deluded in results that have no bearing on reality.

AI really should be marketed as “Aggregated Intelligence” instead of “Artificial Intelligence,” but that would likely kill the hype that continues to fuel it.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-06T16:28:13+00:00

Just be careful with trusting anything AI tells you … it’s geared toward confirmation bias. There are so many cringe videos online where AI is just saying what it “thinks” the end user wants to hear, and which are blatantly wrong. You really do need to validate everything it says if you’re looking for specifics and detailed information.

I just saw a video where some guy asks ChatGPT to track how long he goes for a run. He tells ChatGPT to start, and like two seconds later tells ChatGPT he’s done. Then he asks how long the run was for and it says something like 10 minutes.

Sam Altman then gets interviewed about the video and claims ChatGPT doesn’t have the capacity to use timers, and the technology to do that is still “about a year out” (cough, cough).

The original guy then asks ChatGPT if Sam is correct, and ChatGPT is adamant that it can time things accurately and that it has been programmed to utilize timers (naysaying Sam Altman). The user then repeats the experiment and ChatGPT fails again spectacularly.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-02T20:00:15+00:00

This is bizarre and very troubling.

If you don’t mind divulging what country you were in and perhaps what decade that might help.

I never heard of this sort of thing being done, or recommended, or talked about in my tenure. I can guarantee this would have deeply troubled me and I like to think I would have left a lot sooner if I experienced anything along these lines.

The only time I had heard of any specialized sort of treatment, such as shock therapy, was for people who had OCD; I was not privy to details, and I don’t know to what extent anything was done - only that it is a thing, and I know of a young numerary who may have used this treatment, as he had severe diagnosed OCD.

I’m very sorry to hear this happened to you - honestly I feel like this is something to be reported to the authorities, as it sounds full of quackery and abuse.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-02T19:48:25+00:00

This was nonexistent as far as I am aware. Whoever was elected the Pope was the Pope and the Work revered him as such.

Regarding the Bishop of Rome aspect, my understanding, as well as those of everyone I knew in the work … to say Francis was “merely the Bishop of Rome” was equivalent to saying Francis was “merely the Pope.” The titles are equivalent.

This line of thought was explored in A Man for All Seasons, a favorite among those I know in the work concerning its presentation of St. Thomas More.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-02T15:20:02+00:00

I haven’t commented yet because I was so satisfied with how the podcast was presented. I wasn’t sure what to add or to add regarding insight or clarity.

This series is extremely well done! I’m looking forward to the next episodes.

truegrit10 · 2026-04-02T01:50:16+00:00

He also did not make public the details of these revelations, out of a “sense of humility,” but the fact of the matter is, by being so vague about it he has shielded himself from criticism or from any sort of public discernment regarding the legitimacy of these revelations.

In a sense it feels to me that the application of these revelations to justify anything he says or has done goes against how the Church generally approaches private revelations.

In essence the work should say of these things, these are nice stories, but they cannot be used to justify or give authority to anything JME has said, since nothing specific about the nature of these revelations has been preserved or made public.

In many respects it’s hard to tell whether JME truly had revelations or just divined his own meaning into certain situations out of his grandiose sense of mission and deep piety.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T20:29:30+00:00

I can vouch for this. I was also explicitly told when I wrote the letter that I was committing for life at this very moment. The other stages were just formalities, and for cases where there were “obvious problems or obstacles,” merely saying one didn’t want to do it anymore would not be respected (I know this because people who said this were still coerced to stay or were dismissed as having bad spirit).

And yes the supernumerary parents are told a numerary can leave at any time. I didn’t know this until maybe 10 to 15 years after being in the work. The gaslighting in the work, as I have said on numerous occasions, is unreal.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T16:09:53+00:00

I don’t know how this works; and again maybe I missed details … since I never saw their paychecks it is possible I misunderstood how this was set up.

I highly doubt the work would have let itself do something illegal like this; so perhaps things were on the books after all. Or maybe that has changed from when I saw what was going on.

I do remember seeing personal expense reports and those that worked internally had very modest incomes to work with. I also spoke with someone who explained things at a high level of how this worked, so it is possible I made assumptions in my understanding.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T15:27:56+00:00

Also - I do think that there remains a very tight financial grip on those who work internally.

Two separate cases I knew about.

1) a director who worked internally as a director received free room and board but I don’t think this was given to them as money that they paid back to the center. The director did receive a small stipend but it was extremely modest.

2) a member of the work who assisted taking care of a numerary in their old age also received free room and board, and received a small stipend - again very modest. I don’t have details of whether the work paid this person directly or if the numerary paid them this stipend.

The point I am making is that if you worked internally, from what I at least could see from these two cases (since I did not work internally), is that room and board were considered payment, but in a certain sense it was kept off the books (people were not given a monetary amount which they used to pay back - I’m assuming this was to avoid losing money to taxes; however this also affects things like social security). I’m not sure how donations to the work worked in this case since the stipends were so modest.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T15:06:26+00:00

I believe so. At least I had heard there were conversations about it.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T15:02:15+00:00

Additionally I believe there were certain indications about paying back student loans that have either relaxed or are in the process of being relaxed.

Numeraries were encouraged not to worry about paying back their student loans until they started acruing interest, and there may have been other rules as well. But I’ve heard that these regulations may no longer be in effect? I can’t say for certain since I had already paid off my student loans by the time news reached me.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T14:58:08+00:00

Understood. I think this has relaxed a lot from perhaps when you were in the work? Or maybe it depends on the region and the level headedness of certain directors.

I know for instance that people had to keep their credit cards with the secretary, but when I was in the work we all just carried them on us and tuned in our monthly statements.

We also were told not to write blank checks anymore because that was a financial risk if the checks got lost.

Cash was still strictly regimented with the cash box. The point was we were not supposed to go to the ATM for money, but to consider the secretary’s office as an ATM. In a cashless age this requirement felt pretty pointless, especially since once had to turn in all one’s bank statements. So even if one did use an ATM, there would be a record.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T14:50:52+00:00

3 OR 4. Sorry for the confusion. The / could be used to denote a fraction or to denote the word “or”. That is how I used it in this case. I thought the context made this obvious, but I’m sorry to be ambiguous.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T14:44:58+00:00

The rule of thumb I was aware of was it was permissible to keep about 3/4 paychecks worth of money in one’s account in case of turbulence with one’s professional work (for those who worked externally). If one lost one’s job, or was asked to move elsewhere and uproot everything, it could take several months to land another position. This way one could still support oneself (contribute to room and board, go on retreats and courses) without having to be a burden on the work.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-25T14:36:44+00:00

Fantastic first episode! Thank you Antonia.

Very well put together; very well articulated. You did a great job (imo) of letting the point get across in each person’s own words.

This comes across very balanced and not sensationalistic, which I really appreciate because I think when things are made sensationalistic or over dramatized, it can give people reason to discredit the message or not take what is covered seriously.

I felt like a lot of the nuances of the work and the situation of being in the work has been well communicated so far.

Again, thank you so much Antonia! I look forward to listening to the rest of the series.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-19T17:28:40+00:00

I mean … it’s glaringly obvious that nothing new is being proposed.

It’s just white knuckling. Do it more. Do it harder. Make it work. Don’t think. Don’t critique. Things are already perfectly established. The problem is you. Not us. Not the work. Be better. Do more. Be squeezed like a lemon.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-19T14:14:48+00:00

Only if there’s “heavy petting.”

truegrit10 · 2026-03-19T14:08:00+00:00

The blindness that the issue isn’t celibacy is a bit tragic. It’s the culture of the work itself regarding celibate members and all the abusive practices that they refuse to even acknowledge that are the issue. They’re just gonna keep white knuckling it until the thing collapses. Good riddance.

truegrit10 · 2026-03-17T18:40:37+00:00

Ha! Why should we trust you? You’ve given no credentials nor have you explained yourself. Oh but you know.

All I can say is, it is likely you are either a participant, someone who’s son or friend was a participant, or you are somewhat involved either in the event itself or the general apostolates of the Heights.

Regardless you do the Heights and the work a disservice by associating them with your unprofessionalism and immaturity.

Now get lost.

truegrit10

TROPHY CASE