Belgian cult leader, also known as Moeder (Mother), she founded L’Oeuvre (Het Werk), a religious community recognized as such (pia unio) by the Catholic Church, which enabled her to open her own priestly seminary in Rome.
Her branches extended to Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria (which had become the real nerve centre), Italy, United Kingdom, Hungary, Israel and Burkina Faso.
She was accused of recruitment by brainwashing, compulsory separation of children from their parents, forced recruitment, embezzlement of wages, moonlighting, inheritance, corruption, movement of members from one place to another to provide false leads, techniques of infiltration and espionage of priests, violation of the secrecy of confession and correspondence, and deification.
Members of her community, malnourished, constantly watched, humiliated and punished, were committed by the rule known as “the three pillars”: “neither to reason, nor to discuss, nor to criticize.”
Julia Verhaeghe, whom her disciples would have liked to have seen beatified, regularly subjected them to supposedly mystical crises (her detractors spoke of hysteria arising from psychiatric pathology) and considered herself one of the chosen ones who would save the Church. She died on 29 August 1997 t age 86 in Bregenz, Austria.
Her assistant, the Austrian Maria Katharina Strolz, took the reins of the community, assisted by her niece Grete Binder, secretary to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, president of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)