One of the lead authors of Project 2025, the disturbing blueprint for a potential second Trump presidency, has close ties to a controversial international Catholic group, Opus Dei.
The Guardian reports that Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, receives weekly spiritual guidance from the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., led by an Opus Dei priest. He attends the institution weekly for mass and religious guidance.
In a speech last year at the CIC, Roberts echoed some of the same extreme measures that the Project 2025 manifesto is infamous for, such as outlawing birth control, and called on conservatives to adopt “radical incrementalism” to achieve their policy objectives.
Opus Dei has been criticized as radical, cultlike, and secretive. The organization was founded in 1928 in Spain to combat the anti-Catholic left in the country, and was later granted special rights and privileges by Pope John Paul II to respond to the rise of progressive liberation theology in Latin America. Opus Dei does not believe in the separation of church and state, seeing a symbiotic relationship between the two, and its American adherents view the United States as the last stronghold of Christianity.
Roberts’s ties to Opus Dei don’t end with the CIC. He founded a school in Louisiana, John Paul the Great Academy, that recognizes the organization’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, as its patron. He also was involved in an Opus Dei–affiliated high school leadership program in Austin, Texas, and has spoken at other Opus Dei-linked schools.
Roberts isn’t the only leading conservative close to Opus Dei, either. Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society co-chair who has led the conservative takeover of the judiciary up to the Supreme Court, is also linked to the CIC, even accepting an award from the organization in 2022. In his acceptance speech, Leo praised the center and called his political adversaries “vile and amoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots” influenced by the devil.
Donald Trump and the GOP have been trying, unconvincingly, to distance themselves from the radical Project 2025, and now comes the news that the 900-page document’s leading author also has ties to a powerful religious organization opposed to the separation of church and state. Leo’s involvement only appears to be stronger evidence of the conservative movement seeking to impose a radical religious agenda if Trump wins the presidential election in November.
