The Opus Dei charm offensive has worked wonders for the organization. If David Van Biema's cover story in Time has a thesis statement, it's this: "Opus Dei--not as bad as you thought." This, it seems, is the line taken by many recent investigations of the group, such as John Allen's book Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church (Doubleday).

In the Time article and in Allen's book, Opus Dei members characterize disaffected ex-members' complaints as referring to things of the past. The message is: we've changed. Yet one of the more striking items in the Time spread is a sidebar that presents a different picture. It tells the story of "Lucy," who began working at an Opus Dei retreat house in Massachusetts when she was sixteen, then went off to college at Lexington College in Chicago, an "Opus Dei-affiliated school for women interested in hospitality professions." In her freshman year, Lucy joined Opus Dei as a numerary assistant--the women who cook and clean at Opus Dei facilities.

That was 1985. Lucy left Opus Dei last April, after becoming fed up with the restrictions: she wasn't allowed to stay with family when she vistited them, but had to stay at the local Opus Dei house; and she wasn't permitted to attend her sister's non-Catholic wedding in 2000. With no savings to speak of and no resume, Lucy earns $6.75 an hour, and is so "disillusioned by her Opus Dei experience, she no longer attends Mass at all."

But, after having toiled for Opus Dei for so long, Lucy is accustomed to working for minimum wage (all given back to the organization, of course). Which is interesting, considering the view of poverty held by Opus Dei U.S. vicar Thomas Bohlin, who, Van Biema reports, "jokingly distinguishes his members from 'some Franciscans withholes in their shoes, driving a crummy car because of their sense ofthe spirit of poverty.'"