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Women's Rights & Issues

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bucolic_frolic

(51,502 posts)
Sat Jul 12, 2025, 07:21 AM Jul 12

Anne Marie Allen tells The Women's Podcast about her gruelling life within Opus Dei [View all]

https://www.irishtimes.com/podcasts/the-womens-podcast/recruited-to-opus-dei-at-age-15-i-dont-think-ive-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.
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“They were obsessed with the idea of temptation, of temptation and sin, the occasion of sin,” she says.
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Much more, and the podcast, at the link.
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