Father Arne set up another initiative called the #Leonine #Forum,
a program for top graduates designed to provide them with “intellectual and spiritual seriousness.”

It, too, brought in generous donations from wealthy Catholics keen to steep the leaders of tomorrow in Church teachings.

As ever, the Opus Dei name was kept out of any promotional material
— but, even so, such events deepened the organization’s presence among America’s most influential Catholics.

For Father Arne, the ultimate goal of this outreach was transforming the political sphere,
almost every aspect of which had grown more and more secular over the years.

He believed that policy simply couldn’t be made by people who weren’t versed in the universal truths of the Church.

His mission was to reverse this creeping secularism
— and put Opus Dei at the heart of a spiritual awakening.

Around the same time, #Luis #Tellez, a celibate member of Opus Dei at Princeton, organized a conference at the Vatican that was billed as
“an interreligious colloquium on the complementarity of man and woman.”

While the initiative was officially the idea of the Princeton academic #Robby #George, Tellez and his Opus Dei colleagues in Rome oversaw the organization of the conference.

The "Witherspoon Institute", an organization set up by Tellez and George, made a large donation to the Opus Dei university in Rome around the same time.

“Oftentimes, Robby will open the door, you know,” Tellez explained.
“I’m a nobody.”

The Humanum conference created some additional cachet for Opus Dei operatives in the United States,
who used this important gathering of religious leaders as an enticement to woo big-name Catholic conservatives.

Leonard Leo was one of those invited to participate.

The invitation dovetailed with a wider effort at the Catholic Information Center to entice Leo into the Opus Dei orbit.

At around the same time as the Humanum conference, Leo was invited onto the CIC board.

Their two worlds were already entwined.

Leo’s children went to the two Opus Dei schools
— The Heights for the boys and Oakcrest for the girls
— and he and his wife played an active part in school life,
donating thousands of dollars a year in addition to the many thousands they were paying in tuition for their various children.

The Leos were also regulars at a deeply conservative church in McLean,
not far from their home,
that was popular with many of the city’s Opus Dei members.

Both parties were also becoming ever more aggressive politically.

In 2011, Leo teamed up with Clarence Thomas’s wife #Ginni to co-found another nonprofit that successfully opposed an Islamic center being built near the site of the 9 ⁄11 attacks in New York,
denigrated as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

A year later, he joined the board of the Catholic Association, another non-profit linked to the Corkerys, that funded campaigns to oppose same-sex marriage.

For its part, the Catholic Information Center
— despite in theory being apolitical
— had also joined a suit against the Obama administration,
challenging the requirement that employers provide and pay for contraception,
sterilization, and abortion-causing drugs as part of employee health insurance plans.

The appointment of Leo came despite misgivings among the Opus Dei national leadership,
and illustrated a transactional attitude toward this increasingly influential figure with deep connections to dark money.

“He’s a figure in Washington, and he may have had kids in the school down there,” explained Father Tom Bohlin,
who headed Opus Dei in the United States at the time
— and who met Leo at the Humanum conference in Rome.

“I’m not sure he even understands Opus Dei, but at a certain level, he likes what we do
— certain things
— and wants to support that.”

The appointment of Leo marked a shift in the CIC board.

For years, it had been run by Father Arne, another priest, and a smattering of volunteers drawn from the congregation.

The makeup of the board was decidedly unpolitical
— a mix of academics, lawyers, and volunteers who helped run the bookshop.

#Pat #Cipollone, a lawyer who had been an assistant to Attorney General Bill Barr in the early nineties
but who had since returned to the private sector,
was the only board member who was remotely connected to the Washington political scene.

But in 2014, all that changed.

Alongside Leo, #Bill #Barr, the former attorney general, was also appointed.