Women Allege Opus Dei Abuse in Argentina, Ask Pope Leo to Listen
As Pope Leo XIV visits Argentina, 43 women want to tell him what happened inside Opus Dei residences. In interviews with EFE, two described years of unpaid housework, physical punishment, and warnings that disobedience could cost their families God’s protection.
What the Sisters Were Promised
Nélida Ruiz Díaz had ten bathrooms to clean in Buenos Aires. She did all ten herself. There were bedrooms, too. On her longest days, she worked 20 hours, she told EFE. “I thought I was working for God,” she said. In her family, that was an honor.
She was 15 in 1985 when the offer came to Concordia, in Argentina’s Entre Ríos province. Her father was out of work. She and her 13-year-old sister were told they could study together at a religious school in Buenos Aires. Ruiz Díaz says she never received a wage for the work she ended up doing there. She spent two years planning how to leave.
In Paraguay, María Dominga Godoy’s aunt made her living doing housework. Her employers belonged to Opus Dei. She introduced them to her 13-year-old niece, and they offered the girl a chance to study in Asunción. Godoy was one of ten children in a family short of money. Two years later, in 1978, the organization moved her to Argentina. She had yet to sit in a classroom in the Paraguayan capital, she told EFE.
Godoy did laundry, ironed clothes and served meals to priests and lay members. Both women became what Opus Dei calls assistant numeraries, laywomen who care for its households. The organization denies trafficking or exploiting them. It says assistant numeraries choose that vocation freely and are paid for their work.
What Godoy Feared for Her Family
In a video interview with EFE from Canada, Godoy described what she endured as physical and psychological abuse. She recalled a warning from the women who gave her orders. “If you don’t do it, God won’t help you or your family.” That was how the fear worked, she said. A supervisor could assign a job in Buenos Aires and leave Godoy to weigh what refusal might mean for her brothers and sisters in Paraguay.
The women also described physical penances. Godoy said she still bears marks on her thigh from the cilice, a spiked metal band she wore daily. Ruiz Díaz recalled cold showers and whipping herself during prayers. She had understood that she could offer the pain for someone she loved. When she finally told the people in charge that she wanted to leave, she said they sent her to a parapsychologist and gave her medication that left her dizzy and sleepy.
Godoy said six or seven years passed after she crossed into Argentina before she had her own identity papers. She was about 15 when she arrived and in her twenties by then. Some of the Opus Dei officials Argentine prosecutors want to question had authority in Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia as well as Argentina. A transfer between residences under the same leadership could leave a girl in another country without the documents to make her own way home.
In December 2025, former members from Chile and Mexico were among those who spoke at a Buenos Aires gathering about abuse within Opus Dei. Visitación Villa Mayor, another Paraguayan complainant, said she was 16 when she crossed into Argentina expecting to go to school. In EFE’s account, she described being taken back and forth without papers while still a minor. Four years passed, she said, between asking to leave and being allowed to go.
Godoy returned to Paraguay after 17 years in one Buenos Aires residence. She left Opus Dei in 1999 and settled in Canada six months later. She recalled the stretch of her life from 14 to 33 as years when she had to ask permission for everything.
The Years Missing From a Pension
In 2020, a lawyer representing 43 former members asked Opus Dei to correct their pension contributions. The organization says it met with him and needed more information to check individual records. One former member told Argentine investigators she had kept her pay stubs neatly filed. She thought she had 21 years of contributions. When she checked, she said, 12 or 13 years were missing, more than half the working life she thought those slips accounted for.
Another woman told prosecutors that she signed for her pay and handed the envelope, still sealed, to the secretary at her residence. Later she received a debit card. The secretary kept the card and its PIN, she said. A woman whose signature appeared on the payroll still had to ask for her bus fare.
Argentine prosecutors identified at least 44 possible victims of servitude in a 2024 filing covering allegations from 1972 to 2015. They invoked the trafficking law in four cases involving events after it took effect in 2008. Prosecutors first asked a judge to question four former Opus Dei officials. In 2025, they added a fifth: Monsignor Mariano Fazio, a former regional vicar in Argentina who later became one of Opus Dei’s top officials in Rome. On the eve of Leo’s November 8 visit, EFE reported that the judge had yet to issue the summonses.
On Monday, November 9, Leo is scheduled to meet workers at the Argentine Catholic University in Buenos Aires. The 43 women have asked for time with him during his visit. Church officials had already heard from the men facing accusations, Ruiz Díaz told EFE. “Let them listen to us,” she said.
