An inside look at Opus Dei

With no more than 3,000 members in the United States and 85,000 worldwide, this offshoot of the Catholic church has been accused of using lavish riches and carefully cultivated clout to do everything from propping up Francisco Franco's Spanish dictatorship in the 1950s to pushing through its founder's premature sainthood to planting conservative minions in governments from Warsaw to Washington.

But most of all, it has been known for its silence.

Now, the leaders of the organization are speaking up. Nudging them to talk has been the huge success of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," a book -- and now movie -- that depicts the organization as a group of religious fanatics.