BODY: More than 250,000 people are expected to crowd St. Peter's Square in Rome on Sunday to attend the canonisation of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, a Spanish priest who founded Opus Dei in 1928.

The numbers are surprising for a conservative Catholic movement given that it has been criticised in the past for being "secretive", "fundamentalist", "elitist" and even "manipulative".

Of those expected to attend Sunday's ceremony, around 80,000 will be Italians, 10,000 from Escriva's native Spain and tens of thousands from other European countries. The United States is sending a contingent of 5,000, Australia 1,000, Japan 500. The sheer numbers underscore the huge popularity currently enjoyed by Opus Dei and reflect recent efforts by its members to polish up the movement's somewhat negative public image.

Opus Dei - which means God's Work in Latin - has been described by critics as a secretive and highly influential "Holy Mafia", a wealthy and elitist "church within the church" that tries to attract influential members of society in order to promote its conservative agenda.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of Pope John Paul II's favourite theologians, has described it as a "concentration of fundamentalist power in the Church."

Its members, which total 84,000 around the world, include the pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro Valls.

Members are asked to promote the evangelical mission of the Roman Catholic Church through their professional work and daily life. Membership, which is by invitation only, is not publicised, leaving the movement open to criticism that it acts as a sort of Catholic freemasonry.

Opus Dei prefers to talk of discretion, saying members have no reason to try to publicise their membership "because a lay person's approach to holiness in Opus Dei is something personal, an aspect of his or her private life."

Its founder, whose canonisation process has been one of the fastest in Church history, is not immune to criticism either.

Escriva, who was born in 1902 and died in 1975, has been described as devious, irritable and snobbish. He was once quoted as saying that Adolf Hitler would save Christianity from Communism.

Opus Dei argues that it has been maligned and misunderstood.

"Opus Dei has received widespread praise from both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Yet, Opus Dei is a new institution of the Church. Like other new institutions, Opus Dei has sometimes been misunderstood. This criticism has sometimes been directed at Opus Dei because of its strong faithfulness to the pope, the bishops and the Catholic faith. Other times, the root cause of a controversy, real or apparent, is a misunderstanding of some basic point about Opus Dei," the movement's American web site states.

"When it was founded, many aspects of Opus Dei's spirit, though based on the Gospel, were considered revolutionary for the time, to the point where some called them heretical," Opus Dei argues. "Yet many of these ideas later became part of the Church's official teaching." dpa nr bg

LOAD-DATE: October 3, 2002