What are Opus Dei?

Are Opus Dei a military order? They are lay. They recruit only the "Aristocracy of the intelligentsia". They have full celibate members and associated non-celibate members. They also have financial and spiritual supporters and an order of chaplains. This is exactly the same structure as the Templars or Hospitallers. In the twelfth century the knight, his horse and his armour were the fundamental unit of power in Western Christendom; now there the are different skills central to the exercise of power in the West. It would appear it is the holders of these skills in which the prelature is most interested. The fundamental idea is the same: to insure the ordering of social life to man's true end, "pro sola devotione, non pro honoris vel pecuniae", through the promise of celibacy. The ordinary knights of Outremer were always likely to seek stabilizing alliances with Muslim powers or retire to the safety of Cyprus. The Military orders, however, had no dynastic agenda to advance and preserved the austere spirit of the original crusade. This of course is one of the purposes of celibacy throughout the church. It makes no sense in the terms of this world; it is tied inextricably to the world to come; it institutionalizes the truth that the kingdom is not of this world, and prevents the church turning into an organ of the state.