Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei

Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and the architect of Project 2025, the conservative thinktank’s road map for a second Trump presidency, has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.

Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that – for years – he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.

Related: The force behind Project 2025: Kevin Roberts has the roadmap for a second Trump term

In the speech – which he delivered at the CIC and was recorded and is available online – Roberts spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals that he supports but are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.

Outlawing birth control is the “hardest” political battle facing conservatives in the future, the 50-year-old political strategist said, but he urged conservatives to pursue even small legislative victories – what he called “radical incrementalism” – to advance their most rightwing policy objectives.

Roberts gained notoriety this year as the leading force behind Project 2025, a foundation plan backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to radically upend a broad range of policies if Trump gets elected again, from limiting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights and dismantling the Department of Education, to ending diversity programs and increasing government support for “fertility awareness” programs, like ovulation tracking and practicing periodic abstinence, instead of more reliable contraception.

But Roberts’ personal ties to Opus Dei and the significance of his affiliation, have received far less attention.

Gareth Gore, the author of a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, called the Catholic organization “a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality”. The group’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, saw his followers as part of a “rising militia”, Gore said, who were seeking to “enter battle against the enemies of Christ”.

“Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society,” Gore said. “For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite – and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”

Leo is a conservative activist who has led the Republican mission to install the rightwing majority in the supreme court and finances many of the groups signed on to Project 2025.

Like Roberts, Leo also has links to the Opus Dei-linked CIC. In a 2022 speech accepting the CIC’s highest honor, the John Paul II New Evangelization award, Leo praised the center while also referring to his political opponents as “vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who were under the influence of the devil.

Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have been sounding the alarm on Project 2025 to warn voters of what a second Trump administration could do.

“[Trump] and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. We know we have to take this thing seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris said this week in her first presidential campaign rally, to laughter. “Read it. It’s 900 pages.”

Trump, for his part, has sought to distance himself from the project, though the people behind it have close ties to the former president, and the policies it envisions often align with Trump’s ideas. Roberts has said he is “good friends” with JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, and Vance has praised Project 2025 as having “some good ideas”. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, also wrote the foreword for Roberts’ forthcoming book, praising the author for articulating a “genuinely new future for conservatism”.

“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.

Opus Dei does not disclose the names of its members. The group’s roots date back to a century ago, when the group was established in Spain in response to a clash between conservative Catholics and anti-Catholic socialism and communism in Spain. Decades later, the group was granted special status by the conservative pope John Paul II, who supported Opus Dei and saw it as a response to the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, a progressive church movement.

Some of Opus Dei’s special rights were revoked in recent years by Pope Francis, who is seen as a more progressive pontiff.

One of the core tenets of Opus Dei is that it does not believe in the traditional separation of church and state. Instead, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, it believes the two ought to have a symbiotic relationship.

“They are secretive, so while they are not [outwardly] part of this [Project 2025] per se, it is not surprising at all that some of their members are part of it. They see this moment in politics – and the possibility of allowing ‘woke ideology’ to win – as fundamentally changing the nature of America, western civilization and Christianity,” Faggioli said.

He added: “Opus Dei is part of [a movement of] US conservative and traditionalist Catholicism that holds a view that the United States is the last bastion of Christendom, so that if the United States goes a certain way, so goes Christianity, and Catholicism.”

Indeed Roberts made it clear earlier this month that he believes the US is at a crossroads, and “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

Asked whether it had a view on Roberts’ remarks or Project 2025, a spokesperson for Opus Dei told the Guardian in a statement: “Opus Dei is an institution of the Catholic Church that tries to help people come closer to God in their work and everyday lives. Opus Dei’s aims are purely spiritual and it does not endorse or have any opinion on any political project of any kind.”

Opus Dei is controversial not only in the US. Dozens of women from Argentina and Paraguay filed a complaint to the Vatican over labor exploitation and abuses of power they say they experienced after joining the group at sites in multiple countries. And reporting in Australia gave insight into schools run by Opus Dei, where former students allege their education left them with “psychological damage”.

Roberts’ personal background suggests his ties to Opus Dei are not just limited to the CIC. A school founded by Roberts in Louisiana, called John Paul the Great Academy, considers Opus Dei-founder Escrivá its “patron”.

Roberts was also involved in an Opus Dei-affiliated high school leadership program in Austin, Texas. A website that tracks Opus Dei men’s activities called Where You Are included a profile of the high school program in Austin where Roberts appears to volunteer and “contributes significantly “ to the school’s career and leadership program.

Roberts was featured as a guest at another Opus Dei-linked school, the Camino Schools, in 2023. In introductory remarks before Roberts spoke, the school’s chairman, Bob Rose, praised schools that teach boys and girls they are “different”, they learn differently and are inspired by different things, and where boys are taught by “manly men” who serve as role models.

Roberts’ critics said concerns about his ties to Opus Dei were not connected to his identity or beliefs as a Roman Catholic.

“Kevin Roberts, like all Americans, has a guaranteed freedom to worship or not under our constitution,” said Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability, a non-partisan group that seeks to combat judicial corruption.” That is not at issue. What is of concern is how some powerful elites, like Roberts, who have failed to persuade the American people to embrace their agenda, seem eager to use the power of the executive branch to impose their personal religious views as binding law on other Americans – by barring abortion, using the government to endorse the rhythm method of contraception, even banning mention of ‘condoms’ in women’s preventative health, as well as assailing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.”

Heritage did not respond to a request for comment. The CIC did not respond to a request for comment.

During Roberts’ September 2023 speech, which received little notice at the time but is posted on the center’s YouTube page, Roberts detailed how conservative Catholics and their allies could advance US policy to end access to abortion, same-sex marriage and contraception.

Knowing the unpopularity of banning birth control – a harder political battle to wage than advancing anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage policies – he encouraged an incremental approach to pursuing this long-term goal.

“Even in a politically conservative setting, that can be a very difficult thing to advance,” Roberts told attendees at the CIC event. “A majority of Roman Catholics don’t believe in that teaching, if public opinion surveys are the case. And so it makes it very difficult to advocate for that.”

The faithful should practice the “gift of discernment” to know when to bring it up: “Sometimes the right thing at the right time to the right person isn’t the full teaching of humanity, right? It isn’t the full teaching of contraception. And recognizing that that’s not the time is no way turning into Judas. In fact, it’s being apostolic. And the very definition of the word, which is in modern common parlance, meeting someone where they are.”

In espousing his theory of “radical incrementalism”, or what he called the “enchilada theory”, he said it was critical for conservatives to work first to achieve a small part of a larger policy goal based on what’s politically possible at the moment. Sometimes, he said, having even half an enchilada could be a victory.

On abortion, he noted that Roman Catholics believe “no abortion can be morally justified”, but that even in conservative circles in the US, this is not a majority opinion, and it’s an “even more difficult position to hold” after the Dobbs decision. Using the “same vocabulary of our faith” in the policy arena has a negative effect on electoral outcomes, he said.

Roberts advised listeners not to accept the “narrative framing of the other side” on these issues. He said conservatives who are anti-abortion should stop talking about it the way the left wants them to and instead “talk about the fact that many of them want abortion to be legal until birth”.

Strategies of incrementalism and narrative framing don’t always apply, he added, because sometimes you just have to fight.

“Right now, we have to fight on religious liberty and, in particular, religious liberty as it relates to protecting institutions of faith,” he said. “And that’s not a time for strategic retreat. It’s not a time to be savvy, it’s not a time to be sweet. It’s not a time to develop friendships with the other side. It is a time to take our fist – figuratively, Father Charles – and bust them in the nose because they hate what you and I believe.”