“St. Josemaría was chosen by the Lord to proclaim the universal call to holiness and to show that the ordinary activities that make up everyday life are a path to sanctification” (John Paul II).
Photo: Opus Dei Archives
Newsroom (28/06/2022 13:52, Gaudium Press) On October 6, 2002, in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, before a crowd of more than 300,000 people of all ages and from all five continents, Pope John Paul II celebrated the solemn ceremony of canonization of St. Josemaria Escriva, Founder of Opus Dei.
Pope John Paul II addressed the crowd of faithful, cooperators and friends of Opus Dei:
“St. Josemaria was chosen by the Lord to announce the universal call to holiness and to show that the ordinary activities that make up everyday life are a path to sanctification. One could say that he was the saint of the everyday. In fact, he was convinced that, for those who live under the vision of faith, everything is an occasion for an encounter with God, everything becomes a stimulus for prayer. Seen in this way, daily life reveals an unsuspected greatness. Holiness is truly within everyone’s reach.
Bishop Javier Echevarría who recalled words of St. Josemaria to his spiritual sons, written in the early days of Opus Dei, on March 24, 1930:
“We have come to say, with the humility of one who knows himself to be a sinner and little -‘ homo peccator sum’ (Lk 5:8), we say with Peter – but with the faith of one who lets himself be guided by the hand of God, that holiness is not a thing for the privileged, that the Lord calls us all, from all he expects Love: from all, wherever they may be; from all, whatever their state, their profession or their trade. Because this ordinary, everyday, unremarkable life can be a means to holiness: it is not necessary to abandon one’s state in the world in order to seek God, if the Lord does not give a soul a religious vocation, since all the paths of the earth can be an occasion for an encounter with Christ.
With this, St. Josemaria was doing nothing more than stressing once again the core of the message he had received from God on October 2, 1928, the date of Opus Dei’s foundation. After years of constant prayer and penance, on that date God had shown him his Will, which he had sensed for many years, without being able to see it, and he understood that the only reason for his existence was to give himself completely, with all his strength, to the fulfillment of this divine plan: Opus Dei.
All are called to holiness
In an interview given to L’Osservatore Della Domenica in 1968, Msgr. Escriva defined the vocation to Opus Dei this way
I will say it in a few words: it is to seek to reach sanctity in the midst of the world, in the middle of the street. Those who receive from God the specific vocation to Opus Dei know – and live – that they have to reach sanctity in their own state, in the exercise of their work, manual or intellectual.
The aim of Opus Dei,” he explained in the same interview, “is to encourage Christians who live in the middle of the world, whatever their state or condition, to seek sanctity and carry out the apostolate. The Work was born to help these Christians, inserted in the fabric of civil society – with their families and friendships, their professional work, their noble aspirations – understand that their life, just as it is, can become an opportunity for an encounter with Christ: that is to say, that it is a path to sanctification and apostolate (…). The life of a simple Christian – which may seem vulgar and shy to some – can and must be a holy and sanctifying life.
God thus dispelled the misunderstanding, frequent among many Catholics, that in order to aspire to sanctity, it would be “indispensable to abandon the world, to withdraw from it… or to dedicate oneself to an ecclesiastical activity”.
The path of sanctification in work and in daily duties
A specific feature of the charism of Opus Dei, with which Our Lord has opened practical ways for the sanctification of Christians in the middle of the world, is the perception that professional work (and when we say work, we mean family, social duties, cultural activity, leisure, in short, daily life) can and should be a means and an occasion for sanctity and apostolate.
We have come to call your attention once again,” the Founder explained, “to the example of Jesus, who spent thirty years in Nazareth working, carrying out a trade. In the hands of Jesus, work, and a professional work similar to the one carried out by millions of men in the world, becomes a divine task, a redemptive work, a way of salvation.
That is why he never tired of teaching that, for ordinary Christians, “ordinary life is the true place of Christian existence.
God calls them to serve Him in and from the civil, material, secular tasks of human life. God awaits us every day: in the laboratory, in the operating room of a hospital, in the barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the
field, in the bosom of the home, and in all the immense panorama of work. Let us never forget: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, something that each one of us must discover (…).
There is no other way, my children: either we know how to find the Lord in our everyday life, or we will never find Him.”
With a synthetic expression, which he liked to repeat, he summed up this ideal of holiness by saying that it consists in “sanctifying work, sanctifying oneself in work, and sanctifying others through work.”
Christ, Mary, the Pope
This inevitably summary outline of the charism and spiritual message of the Founder of Opus Dei would not be complete if we did not mention his warm and intense devotion to our Lady (whom he invoked in everything and for everything, without ever separating her from St. Joseph) and his passionate love for the Holy Church, the Roman Pontiff and the bishops in communion with the Holy See.
Omnes cum Petro, ad Iesum per Mariam – All with Peter, to Jesus through Mary. This is the spiritual roadmap that he proposed as a motto to his spiritual children from the very beginning, and that, following his example and teachings, the faithful of the Prelature of Opus Dei try to follow and spread with joy and fidelity.
“Be Mary’s and you will be ours,” he wrote in the 1930s. “One always goes to Jesus and ‘returns’ through Mary,” he affirmed as a supernatural axiom. And he stressed: “Love for our Lady is proof of a good spirit, in works and in individuals. He is suspicious of the enterprise that does not have this sign.
And as for love for the Pope, he prayed thus: “Thank you, my God, for the love for the Pope that you have put in my heart. “Catholic, Apostolic, Roman! I like that you are very Roman. And that you have desires to make your pilgrimage, videre Petrum, to see Peter.”
This love for Mary, the Church and the Pope is one of the most striking traits of his spirit, which he indelibly engraved in the souls of the faithful of the Prelature, and which, through them, is becoming engraved in the hearts of all those who come to Opus Dei and seek to live its spirit.
By Father Francisco Faus
Text adapted from the magazine Heralds of the Gospel, August/2007, n. 68.
Compiled by Teresa Joseph
