Our son is almost a stranger

IN many ways, Sheila and John couldn't have asked for a better
son. Good-looking, witty and bright, Simon was a model pupil at his Catholic school, and won himself a place to read biochemistry at Cambridge university. He never drank to excess, took drugs, or got into bother with the police.
"It seems funny that, of our five children, Simon should have been the one to cause us all this trouble," sighs Sheila, looking sadly at a photograph of the son she and John say has become "almost a stranger".
Especially funny, indeed ironic, too, is the fact that it is religion which, the Brooks say, has divided them from their youngest child. And not some obscure religion but Catholicism — or at least, a wing of the Catholic church: that rather mysterious, some believe sinister wing, Opus Mi.
"The extraordinary thing about Opus Dei in Britian is that most ordinary Catholics simply don't know a thing about it. In a way that's been one of the main frustrations for us. We'd tell people we knew about our experience with Simon, and they would not look blank and not have the faintest idea what we were talking about," says John. Opus Dei, he concludes, is enveloped in a secretive, closed world. Parents like the Brooks are allowed only the merest peek behind the curtains when their child decides to embrace its community-based life.
Like most of the Catholics they say they now meet, the Brooks had never heard of Opus Dei when, back in 1982, Simon came back from Cambridge one weekend and told them he was going on a pilgrimage to Rome with some friends from university. "We thought nothing much of it," says Sheila, "until he came back with all his photographs to show us, and then I noticed that all the people he'd been with were men, and that they were all wearing hats with some strange badge on them. I asked what the badge was, and Simon just said 'Opus Dei'. It didn't mean anything at all to me."
Over the following months and years, Opus Dei was to come to mean a great deal, and most of it negative, to the Brooks. Slowly but surely, they claim, their young son — aged only 19 or so when he first got involved with the fraternity — became a more and more estranged from them, more and more "within the clutches", as they saw it, of Opus Dei.
"Simon had been very keen on sharing a flat in Cambridge during his last year at university, so we were really surprised when he suddenly announced that he had changed his mind and that he was going to live in an Opus Dei house. We weren't too worried by it, but I remember one remark which I thought was curious," says John. "I asked Simon why he wanted to live in
this house, and he said back in reply that 'they' were keen for him to do well. He didn't explain any more, but I felt it was odd."
Simon did do well in his final examinations, and took up a highly-skilled post with a large chemicals firm. Although his parents had grown increasingly concerned about his involvement with Opus Dei during his year in their Cambridge house — at one point, Sheila had driven over to demand to see Simon after he had been "unavailable" every time she phoned — they hoped that graduation would see him cutting his links with the organisation.
Instead, they were horrified to hear Simon, during one of his rare weekends at home, mutter something about the possibility of taking a vow of celibacy. ("We couldn't believe it. We thought he was far to young, at 20 or so, to consider taking such a step.") Also, he announced that, while working in London in his new job, he was to live in another Opus Dei house.
The Brooks quizzed Simon about his future and the kind of life he would be living at the house, and were surprised to learn that their son had agreed to hand over his entire income to Opus Dei. "He told us he was given back an allowance for the things he wanted, and that he could apply for money for train fares when he was coming to see us or going away," says Sheila.
But the Brooks' biggest worry about the financial arrangement is that it is making their son more and more dependent on the organisation, and making it harder and harder for him to leave. "If he was to go now he'd have no savings, although he'd been earning a good wage for several years," says Sheila.
The couple are aware that many of these factors, though understandably upsetting for them as parents, are not really very di f fere nt from the withdrawal of anyone who joins the religious life in any guise. But what they say they find most upsetting, and the aspect they claim is most worrying about Opus Dei as compared with less introspective organisations, is the character change they have seen come over ther son.
II. he had become a Franciscan, a Benedictine or a Jesuit, ney contend, they would have hoped to have seen Simon grow as a person and become more nature, more caring, more open to others.
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