Project 2025's Kevin Roberts and his association with the secretive far-right Catholic group Opus Dei

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, often described as the architect of Project 2025, has ties to the far-right and secretive Roman Catholic group Opus Dei.

“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,” The Guardian reports. “Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.”

Related: Project 2025 co-author Mike Howell accused of hypocrisy after photo emerges with friend in drag (exclusive)

In his speech, which can be viewed online, Roberts talked about banning contraception, which he said will be the most difficult goal for him and his allies to achieve. But they can win this and other fights with a strategy of “radical incrementalism,” passing legislation that gives them some of what they want and can be built upon, he said. The same approach can be used for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights, including marriage equality, Roberts said.

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Project 2025, a blueprint of what far-right activists want from the next conservative president, has much in common with Opus Dei, Gareth Gore, who has written a book about Opus Dei, told The Guardian.

“Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society,” he 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.” Gore further called Opus Dei “a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality.”

Leo is the former executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a right-wing group that influenced Donald Trump’s judicial choices, and is now cochair of its board. He is a funder of many conservative causes, including the campaign against Bud Light for its marketing partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Leo likewise has connections to Opus Dei and the Catholic Information Center. In 2022, he received the center’s John Paul II New Evangelization award. In his acceptance speech, he called his opponents “vile and amoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots” and said they were in the hands of the devil, The Guardian reports. Pope John Paul II elevated Opus Dei to a special status in the Catholic Church, while Pope Francis has revoked some of its privileges.

Opus Dei does not release the names of its members, and a spokesperson told The Guardian, “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.”

But “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,” Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, told the publication. “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.”

Project 2025 includes plans to fire as many as 50,000 career federal employees and replace them with people who have unquestionable loyalty to the president; restrict access to contraception; possibly implement a national abortion ban; cut federal health care programs; and remove a variety of protections for LGBTQ+ people.

It urges the next conservative president to basically ignore the 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County Supreme Court decision banning anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in the workplace, calls on the federal government to deprioritize what it dubs “LGBTQ+ equity” and promote so-called traditional families, and rails against the “toxic normalization of transgenderism.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has claimed he doesn't know anything about Project 2025, at the same time saying he disagrees with some of its provisions. However, his running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, is friends with Roberts and has written the foreword for Roberts's forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.