Serve

My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland's Opus Dei

By: Anne Marie Allen

Narrated by: Avena Mansergh-Wallace

Anne Marie Allen was 15 when she was accepted onto a cookery-school course that promised real qualifications and a future in the career of her dreams. Seeking a better life, she moved to the calm and peaceful countryside of the west of Ireland. Her happiness was short-lived as it became clear she had been tricked instead into a life of domestic servitude to the members of Opus Dei. Before long Anne Marie was whisked away to Rome where she signed her life away with vows to serve.

What followed were years of misery in slavery, forced celibacy and traumatic physical suffering under an ambitious and tyrannical institution that demanded perfection, humiliation and pain.

Her family eventually managed to coerce a visit home where they refused to let her return to the Order, and where they began the long process of deprogramming Anne Marie – a task that has been a lifelong struggle. Serve is Anne Marie's remarkable story of strength and resilience in the face of religious zealotry.

©2025 Anne Marie Allen (P)2026 Bolinda Publishing

Horrific Story of Child Trafficking & Abuse Within the Catholic Institution

Shocking how these women (and men) were recruited and brainwashed once joining this organization affiliated with the Catholic Church. The author, a victim herself, gives chilling details of the dark side of this way of life or maybe a ‘religious cult prison’ is more accurate.
Thank God this woman freed herself of these evil people and escaped to save her sanity.

Being a lifelong Catholic myself and attending our church’s parochial elementary school, the book actually leaves you questioning the morals & principals of the priests and nuns who taught my school.