Fourteen men, eleven countries, one institution each of them served for years before walking out of it. That ledger sits at the center of The Good Spirit: Behind the Doors of the Opus Dei, the documentary series in which former numeraries and priests of Opus Dei describe, on the record, how the organization found them, ranked them and held on to them.

The men are not speaking from the margins. Many of them held positions inside the hierarchy, which is what separates this account from the usual disgruntled-ex-member story. They were, for a time, part of the machinery they now describe. That is a rare vantage point, and the series is built to use it.

The second half of an investigation

This is not where Mònica Terribas started. The journalist created and directed El minuto heroico: Yo también dejé el Opus Dei, in which thirteen women recounted the labour, spiritual and psychological pressure they said they had lived under inside the prelature. That series won the 2025 Ondas Prize, one of Spain’s most established awards in broadcasting and journalism. The Good Spirit is its companion volume, turning from the women who were served to some of the men who did the serving and the running.

The shift in subject changes what the testimony can show. Women in the first series often described the domestic and administrative labour that kept Opus Dei’s houses running. The men in this one describe the other side of the same structure: recruitment, formation, the chain of obedience, and the movement of money and influence that a global institution requires. Put together, the two series attempt something closer to a full diagram than either could alone.

What the men describe

According to the material Mediapro and HBO Max have released, the accounts converge on a system rather than a set of isolated complaints. The men describe how prospective members are identified and drawn in, how obedience is trained and rewarded, and how a personal life gets reorganized around the institution’s needs across borders. Several of them were sent abroad as teenagers, to countries they did not choose, at an age when consent is a complicated word. The series presents those journeys as decisions made for them rather than by them.

The eleven countries — Spain, Italy, France, Poland, Germany, England, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, the United States and Argentina — are not set dressing. They are the point. An institution that can move a teenager from one continent to another, and keep him inside its structure for years, is operating at a scale that no single national story captures. The multiplication of accounts is the evidence: one defector is a grievance; fourteen converging on the same mechanisms is a description.

Part of what gives the men’s vantage its weight is the role most of them occupied. Numeraries are the celibate lay members at the core of Opus Dei — the members who typically live in the organization’s centres and, in the arrangement the institution has long practised, direct their earnings to it. Members refer to the prelature simply as la Obra, the Work. A former numerary is therefore not describing something he glimpsed from the pews; he is describing an arrangement he lived inside, including the part where a salary and a life were folded into an institution’s balance sheet.

Testimony held in place by expertise

Terribas does not leave the accounts to stand alone. The series pairs first-person testimony with named domain expertise, which is the difference between amplifying a grievance and building an argument. Canon-law professor Santiago Bueno Salinas, a judicial figure in the Barcelona Ecclesiastical Tribunal, addresses the institution’s standing within the Church. Sociologist María Esther Fernández Mostaza of the Autonomous University of Barcelona situates the recruitment and formation practices. Clinical psychologist Vega González speaks to the psychological mechanics. And Gareth Gore, the investigative journalist whose book Opus reconstructed the organization’s financial history, supplies the money trail that individual testimony cannot. Gore’s reporting traced how the prelature’s finances and influence were built and moved; placed beside the men’s accounts of handing over their working lives, it turns a set of personal stories into a question about where the money went and who decided.

Where the documentary needs to stage what testimony describes, it uses reenactment rather than pretending to hold archival footage it does not have. Actors Joel Bosqued and Guillem Balart perform those sequences, directed by Pere Sala. The choice is honest about its own limits: it dramatizes an account without dressing it up as a recording of the event.

Allegation, framed as allegation

Everything the men say is their account and their allegation, presented as personal experience. Opus Dei, the Catholic personal prelature founded by Josemaría Escrivá in 1928, has faced years of international scrutiny over its recruitment, labour and formation practices, and has been the subject of a Vatican-ordered revision of its statutes. The institution disputes characterizations of coercion and describes membership as a free vocation. A documentary built on former members’ testimony is not a court, and The Good Spirit does not pretend to deliver a verdict. Its value is the accumulation of accounts from people who were inside long enough to know how the doors open and close.

That distinction — testimony, not judgment — is also what keeps the series from tipping into the true-crime register that its structure otherwise resembles. It belongs to the lineage of institution-from-the-inside documentaries, from Going Clear to The Vow to Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, where former members supply the map and viewers are trusted to read it. What it inherits from that lineage is the method; what it localizes is the institution and the specifically Spanish tradition of investigative documentary that Terribas comes from.

A Spanish investigation, released to the world

There is a quiet argument in the distribution itself. A Spanish-language investigation into a global institution arrives worldwide on HBO Max on the same day, which is how faith-and-power documentaries now travel — like true crime, without waiting for an English-language remake. All three episodes drop at once rather than weekly, so the fourteen accounts can be read as a single structure instead of a serialized reveal.

What the testimony cannot do is give back what it describes. The years spent inside, the countries assigned, the version of a self built to a specification — none of that returns because a man finally says it aloud. The Good Spirit sits with that limit instead of resolving it, which is the most defensible thing a documentary about a life inside an institution can do.

The Good Spirit: what to know

The Good Spirit: Behind the Doors of the Opus Dei (original title El buen espíritu: Detrás de la puerta del Opus Dei) is a three-episode documentary series created and directed by Mònica Terribas, produced by The Mediapro Studio for HBO Max. It is the follow-up to El minuto heroico and is built on the testimony of fourteen former male members of Opus Dei from eleven countries. All three episodes premiere on HBO Max on 25 September 2026.

Tags: hbo max, documentary, Gareth Gore, Mònica Terribas, Opus Dei, The Good Spirit: Behind the Doors of the Opus Dei