English
Documentation
Bishop Javier Echevarría, Prelate of Opus Dei. Rome, June 26, 2008
Bishop Javier Echevarría
Dear brothers and sisters,
All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (Rom 8:14). This is the astounding truth which the second reading of today’s Mass recalls, in the words of St Paul to the Romans. It is an essential truth of the Christian faith, which, by God’s will, became the hinge of St Josemaría Escrivá’s preaching right from the earliest times of his vocation. There comes to my mind the opening phrase of his book The Forge: “We are children of God. —Bearers of the only flame that can light up the paths of the earth for souls, of the only brightness which can never be darkened, dimmed or overshadowed. —The Lord uses us as torches, to make that light shine out... It depends on us that many should not remain in darkness, but walk instead along paths that lead to eternal life” (The Forge, 1).
Awareness of his divine sonship in Christ impelled St Josemaría, who was a docile instrument of the Paraclete, to pass on this great news to everyone he met along his journey on earth, encouraging them to follow the paths to holiness. Because, as the Apostle St Paul goes on to say, The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him (Rom 8:16-17).
These reflections move us to raise up our thanksgiving to God, and so does the fact that He has given the Church the life of St Josemaría, an instrument God used to reawaken the awareness of their divine sonship in many souls.
Let us also thank God our Lord because in a few days’ time, on 28 June, it will be the beginning of the Year of St Paul which the Holy Father has decided upon to celebrate the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of the Apostle to the Gentiles. This is a special opportunity to meditate on St Paul’s life and teachings, and it is an event that stimulates us to follow Christ by imitating the drive and total self-surrender which we can see in the life of this great Apostle.
A further reason for gratitude to God is that today, the Tribunal of the Diocese of Rome completed the preliminary investigation for the Cause for the beatification and canonization of the Servant of God Bishop Alvaro del Portillo. This is only the first step, but it is a step that fills us, and many other people throughout the world, with happiness, because we see our beloved Don Alvaro as a man of integrity, a genuine Christian, a good pastor, and a most faithful son to St Josemaria, since he learnt how to follow in his footsteps better than anyone else, receiving fully into himself the spirit that God entrusted to the Founder of Opus Dei.
Today’s liturgical feast reminds us that the call – the Christian vocation! – to holiness is based on the fact of our divine sonship. It also invites us to consider the context of this calling: ordinary, everyday life, and specifically, the ordinary work and family life that make up most of our day.
It is true that we work to earn money to support ourselves and our families, but, as St Josemaria taught us, work has to be something far greater than that. It is “born of love; it is a manifestation of love and is directed toward love” (Christ is Passing By, 48).
The fact is that after creating our first parents, God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it (Gen 2:15). When he meditated on this passage from the Book of Genesis, St Josemaría was filled with joy and gratitude. “Work,” he wrote, “is man’s original vocation. It is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken. The Lord, who is the best of fathers, placed the first man in Paradise ut operaretur, so that he would work.” (Furrow, 482).
Work, then, is not a punishment. The command to work came before original sin. Work is a task entrusted to all human beings, so that they can cooperate with God in the orderly development of material creation. The Founder of Opus Dei meditated on this lesson from Sacred Scripture and, with God-given light, saw the great value of work as a means of holiness and apostolate.
During a congress on St Josemaría’s teachings, Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, underlined the notable contribution made by our Father to the Second Vatican Council’s solemn proclamation of the universal call to holiness. Specifically, he dwelt upon the statement that “holiness is reached, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, through ordinary life. Holiness consists in this – living our daily life with our sights fixed on God; shaping all our actions to accord with the Gospel and the spirit of Faith. Each and every theological understanding of the world and of history derives from this core reality,” as many passages in the writings of Saint Josemaría “so clearly and incisively show.”*
The call to cooperate in the Church’s saving mission is inseparable from the call to holiness. Now too, as in our Lord’s time, the mass of people are hungry for God’s word. This is the scene from the Gospel that we have just re-lived once again. Our Lord got into Peter’s boat to address the crowd; he used the material help offered by Simon and the other disciples to make his message reach further. This is a first way of sharing in his evangelizing mission – supplying the Church with the material means she needs in order to work more effectively in the service of souls.
But that is not enough. Our Lord also asks us to cooperate in the apostolate personally, in ways that will depend on our own situation and abilities. The miraculous catch of fish is also a sign of the apostolic effectiveness of obedience to the word of the Master. After teaching the crowd, Jesus told Peter and the other disciples: Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch (Lk 5:4). Simon obeyed the Lord’s command, in spite of his recent failure to catch any fish. And then the miracle happened: they netted a great shoal of fish (Lk 5:6).
If we cultivate our friendship with Jesus in personal prayer, if we receive the Sacraments of Reconciliation and Holy Communion regularly, if we appeal to our Lady, the Angels and Saints, our intercessors before God, then we too will be able to work the same miracles. But for this to happen, we also need to love our friends and companions, and all souls, sincerely. Christians have to be apostolic!
There is a great need for women and men who are seriously committed to bringing souls to lay at Christ’s feet, like the first Apostles. I remind you of what the Holy Father said on the day he began his pastoral service in the See of Peter. “Today too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to put out into the deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win men and women over to the Gospel – to God, to Christ, to true life. (…) We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God’s light, into true life. It is really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of men, we must bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many forms of alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God. It is really so: the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men. And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is.”
St Josemaría used to invite us to ask ourselves every day, “What have I done today to bring someone to our Lord?” Often it will be a conversation that gives them orientation, an invitation to go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or a piece of advice that helps them to understand some aspect of Christian life better. And all this will always be accompanied by a generous offering of prayer, mortification, and work done well. These are the principal means we have to use to accomplish our apostolic endeavours.
As well as being a good intercessor, St Josemaría is a splendid model of someone who learned to turn his work into prayer, and labour with Christ for the spreading of the Kingdom of God. Let us entrust to our holy Mother Mary the specific resolutions we have formed in these few minutes, that they may be fully effective. Amen.
* Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Inaugural message at the Opening Ceremony of the symposium “Holiness and the World”, Rome, 12 October 1993
Awareness of his divine sonship in Christ impelled St Josemaría, who was a docile instrument of the Paraclete, to pass on this great news to everyone he met along his journey on earth, encouraging them to follow the paths to holiness. Because, as the Apostle St Paul goes on to say, The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him (Rom 8:16-17).
These reflections move us to raise up our thanksgiving to God, and so does the fact that He has given the Church the life of St Josemaría, an instrument God used to reawaken the awareness of their divine sonship in many souls.
Let us also thank God our Lord because in a few days’ time, on 28 June, it will be the beginning of the Year of St Paul which the Holy Father has decided upon to celebrate the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of the Apostle to the Gentiles. This is a special opportunity to meditate on St Paul’s life and teachings, and it is an event that stimulates us to follow Christ by imitating the drive and total self-surrender which we can see in the life of this great Apostle.
A further reason for gratitude to God is that today, the Tribunal of the Diocese of Rome completed the preliminary investigation for the Cause for the beatification and canonization of the Servant of God Bishop Alvaro del Portillo. This is only the first step, but it is a step that fills us, and many other people throughout the world, with happiness, because we see our beloved Don Alvaro as a man of integrity, a genuine Christian, a good pastor, and a most faithful son to St Josemaria, since he learnt how to follow in his footsteps better than anyone else, receiving fully into himself the spirit that God entrusted to the Founder of Opus Dei.
Today’s liturgical feast reminds us that the call – the Christian vocation! – to holiness is based on the fact of our divine sonship. It also invites us to consider the context of this calling: ordinary, everyday life, and specifically, the ordinary work and family life that make up most of our day.
It is true that we work to earn money to support ourselves and our families, but, as St Josemaria taught us, work has to be something far greater than that. It is “born of love; it is a manifestation of love and is directed toward love” (Christ is Passing By, 48).
The fact is that after creating our first parents, God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it (Gen 2:15). When he meditated on this passage from the Book of Genesis, St Josemaría was filled with joy and gratitude. “Work,” he wrote, “is man’s original vocation. It is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken. The Lord, who is the best of fathers, placed the first man in Paradise ut operaretur, so that he would work.” (Furrow, 482).
Work, then, is not a punishment. The command to work came before original sin. Work is a task entrusted to all human beings, so that they can cooperate with God in the orderly development of material creation. The Founder of Opus Dei meditated on this lesson from Sacred Scripture and, with God-given light, saw the great value of work as a means of holiness and apostolate.
During a congress on St Josemaría’s teachings, Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, underlined the notable contribution made by our Father to the Second Vatican Council’s solemn proclamation of the universal call to holiness. Specifically, he dwelt upon the statement that “holiness is reached, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, through ordinary life. Holiness consists in this – living our daily life with our sights fixed on God; shaping all our actions to accord with the Gospel and the spirit of Faith. Each and every theological understanding of the world and of history derives from this core reality,” as many passages in the writings of Saint Josemaría “so clearly and incisively show.”*
The call to cooperate in the Church’s saving mission is inseparable from the call to holiness. Now too, as in our Lord’s time, the mass of people are hungry for God’s word. This is the scene from the Gospel that we have just re-lived once again. Our Lord got into Peter’s boat to address the crowd; he used the material help offered by Simon and the other disciples to make his message reach further. This is a first way of sharing in his evangelizing mission – supplying the Church with the material means she needs in order to work more effectively in the service of souls.
But that is not enough. Our Lord also asks us to cooperate in the apostolate personally, in ways that will depend on our own situation and abilities. The miraculous catch of fish is also a sign of the apostolic effectiveness of obedience to the word of the Master. After teaching the crowd, Jesus told Peter and the other disciples: Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch (Lk 5:4). Simon obeyed the Lord’s command, in spite of his recent failure to catch any fish. And then the miracle happened: they netted a great shoal of fish (Lk 5:6).
If we cultivate our friendship with Jesus in personal prayer, if we receive the Sacraments of Reconciliation and Holy Communion regularly, if we appeal to our Lady, the Angels and Saints, our intercessors before God, then we too will be able to work the same miracles. But for this to happen, we also need to love our friends and companions, and all souls, sincerely. Christians have to be apostolic!
There is a great need for women and men who are seriously committed to bringing souls to lay at Christ’s feet, like the first Apostles. I remind you of what the Holy Father said on the day he began his pastoral service in the See of Peter. “Today too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to put out into the deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win men and women over to the Gospel – to God, to Christ, to true life. (…) We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God’s light, into true life. It is really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of men, we must bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many forms of alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God. It is really so: the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men. And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is.”
St Josemaría used to invite us to ask ourselves every day, “What have I done today to bring someone to our Lord?” Often it will be a conversation that gives them orientation, an invitation to go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or a piece of advice that helps them to understand some aspect of Christian life better. And all this will always be accompanied by a generous offering of prayer, mortification, and work done well. These are the principal means we have to use to accomplish our apostolic endeavours.
As well as being a good intercessor, St Josemaría is a splendid model of someone who learned to turn his work into prayer, and labour with Christ for the spreading of the Kingdom of God. Let us entrust to our holy Mother Mary the specific resolutions we have formed in these few minutes, that they may be fully effective. Amen.
* Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Inaugural message at the Opening Ceremony of the symposium “Holiness and the World”, Rome, 12 October 1993
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