English
Documentation
A Way Through the World
John Wauck
Un cammino attraverso il mondo (“A Way Through the World”), published at the end of 2008 by Lindau in Italy (www.lindau.it), is an anthology of texts taken from the writings of St. Josemaria Escrivá. It includes extracts from his books, homilies, interviews, letters and diaries, in Italian. The texts were selected and introduced by Fr. John Wauck.
The following is an English version of the introduction, in which Fr. Wauck discusses St Josemaria’s personality and the context in which Opus Dei first saw the light.
A Way Through the World: A St. Josemaria Escrivá Reader
The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
“Reply to Papini”, Wallace Stevens
General Introduction
The Work of God
In the year 1925, in his magnum opus, The Everlasting Man, the English author G.K. Chesterton drew attention to what he called the “riddles” of the Gospel, and, speaking about the thirty mysterious years of Jesus Christ’s so-called “hidden life” in Nazareth, he observed:
It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and nobody so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable.(1)
Little did the creator of the Fr. Brown detective stories know, but soon a young Spanish priest from the provincial town of Barbastro in northeastern Spain would discover a profound meaning in those “forgotten” years, finding in them a model for a radically new path of holiness in the Catholic Church. It was just three years later, in 1928, that the 26-year-old priest, Josemaria Escrivá, clearly saw the task to which he would dedicate his life: the search for sanctity in the middle of the world, through one’s ordinary daily life, following the example of Jesus Christ’s years as a carpenter in Nazareth. To the eyes of Fr. Escrivá, the years that Chesterton found so impressively opaque were full of illuminating lessons:
Our Lord’s whole life fills me with love for him, but I have a special weakness for his thirty hidden years spent in Bethlehem, Egypt and Nazareth. That period, so long in comparison with his public life and which the Gospels hardly mention, might seem empty of any special meaning to a person who views it superficially. And yet, I have always maintained that this silence about Our Lord’s early life speaks eloquently for itself and contains a wonderful lesson for us Christians. They were years of intense work and prayer, years during which Jesus led an ordinary life, a life like ours, we might say, which was both divine and human at the same time. In his simple workshop, unnoticed, he did everything to perfection, just as he was later to do before the multitudes.(2)
The new way of seeking holiness would be called “Opus Dei” (Latin for God’s Work), and it would spread throughout the entire world. In 2002, the young priest, whose writings are anthologized in this volume, would enter the Church’s liturgical calendar as Saint Josemaria Escrivá.
Domine ut videam!
Born in Barbastro, in the province of Aragon, on January 9, 1902, Escrivá grew up there and in Logroño, where his family moved in 1915, after the failure of his father’s business in Barbastro. Inspired by the sight of footprints in the snow left by a barefoot Carmelite friar, the teenage Josemaria decided that God was asking something special of him and, in order to prepare himself, he entered the local seminary, studying there and later in Zaragoza, where he also studied civil law (he would eventually receive doctorates in both canon and civil law).
When his father died in 1924, Escrivá, not yet a deacon, found himself the head of his family, responsible for the welfare of his mother, older sister and younger brother (three younger sisters had died of influenza in the years preceding the First World War). In March of 1925, he was ordained a priest and, after working for two years in the diocese of Zaragoza, he moved with his family to Madrid to continue his legal studies. While in Madrid, he was chaplain of a charitable foundation, and he worked extensively in the hospitals and poorer neighborhoods, teaching catechism, hearing confessions, and assisting the dying. All the while, he was asking God to make clear His will: during these years, the cry of Bartimaeus, the blind man in the Gospels – Domine, ut videam! Lord, that I might see! – was his constant prayer.
About a year after arriving in the capital, on October 2, 1928, while making a spiritual retreat, he finally saw the special task that God was entrusting to him. This was the turning point in his life: from that point on, the biography of Josemaria Escrivá is inseparable from the history of Opus Dei.
What “world” did he have in mind?
In many of the selections in this volume, when Escrivá speaks of Opus Dei, he talks about finding God in and through the things and events of the secular world, and the reader may well ask: what “world” did he have in mind? What was the world that he knew?
Opus Dei came into being between the two great wars, amid the sundry affairs and dramatic changes of the late 1920s. It was a time of transition and turmoil, of traditions abandoned and re-discovered. In 1928, the year that St. Josemaria was founding Opus Dei, his contemporaries and compatriots, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, were making the classic surrealist film Un chien andalou. In that same year, a Catholic convert, the Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, author of Kristin Lavransdatter, won the Nobel Prize for literature. Another recent Catholic convert, Ernest Hemingway, was finishing A Farewell to Arms. Evelyn Waugh, on the verge of converting to Catholicism, was publishing his first novel, Decline and Fall.
During the summer Olympics that summer in Amsterdam, the world watched the swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, later famous as “Tarzan”, win two gold medals. Just one month after Opus Dei was founded, Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” premiered in Paris and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Walt Disney’s creation Mickey Mouse made his first film appearance.
The previous year, Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo flight across that same ocean, the Austrian film director Fritz Lang made his masterpiece, Metropolis, and Al Jolson’s movie The Jazz Singer announced the end of the silent era in cinema with the famous words “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”
A year later, a catastrophic stock market crash would usher in the Great Depression and, in Italy, the signing of the Lateran Pact would end the pope’s long decades as a “prisoner of the Vatican.” On the Iberian peninsula, political tensions were leading Spain toward a bloody civil war that would touch St. Josemaria and Opus Dei very directly.
This, one might say, is “the world” as St. Josemaria knew it, and far from being aloof from such contemporary events, the founder of Opus Dei was deeply immersed in them. His diaries from the 1930s reveal that he was such an avid reader of the daily papers that he had to work hard to control his thirst for the latest news. More importantly, he came to see that it was precisely this world that had to be made a home for contemplation, a place for a personal encounter with God. In this volume (in the chapter on “Children of God”), one can read St. Josemaria’s own account of the most sublime prayer that he ever enjoyed. It occurred on October 16, 1932, not long after the founding of Opus Dei, in the early days of the Second Spanish Republic. In view of Opus Dei’s message, it is remarkably fitting that this period of intense prayer took place not in a church or on a mountaintop, but on a tram, while St. Josemaria was reading a newspaper. Its emblematic significance was not lost on him.
His remarkable faith
What is most striking, however, about the early years of Opus Dei is the remarkable faith of its young founder. Bringing a new institution to life in this period of intense political passions, bold creativity and great uncertainty on many fronts (social, economic, cultural), he faced serious obstacles. The priest, who had his own family to support, had no economic resources. As he frequently said, when Opus Dei began, he had absolutely nothing but God’s grace and a good sense of humor. In the beginning, he was misunderstood. The novelty of his message led others to call him a heretic and a madman. Vocations were slow in coming, and several of the first few members either left Opus Dei or died prematurely. Then, in 1936, came the Spanish Civil War. As a result, the handful of early members was scattered throughout Spain. Religious persecution in the Republican zone, which claimed the lives of thousands of priests and a dozen bishops, forced Escrivá himself to go into hiding at the start of the war and, late in 1937, to flee through the Pyrenees into France, eventually settling in Burgos on the other side of the front.
When the Civil War ended in 1939, the only center of Opus Dei was a bombed-out ruin in Madrid, and the 37-year-old founder had almost nothing to show for more than a decade of work. And yet, his writings from this period reveal not a sense of discouragement, but rather his unshakable conviction that, because it was God’s work and not his own, Opus Dei was destined to grow and spread throughout the entire world. One fruit that did emerge from the war years was his first and most famous book, Camino (The Way), a collection of 999 points for reflection and prayer, published in 1939. It has sold well over a million copies.
Rome. A night praying for the Pope
As soon as World War II ended, St. Josemaria moved to Rome, and the Eternal City remained his home for the rest of his life. The same faith that he needed in Spain was evident during his Roman years. Before it could be approved by the Holy See and find its proper place in the structure of the Church, the new organization had to overcome major canonical and institutional hurdles. To lead Opus Dei forward on this juridical journey and in its apostolate around the world (these were the years of Opus Dei’s expansion throughout Europe and the Americas), Escrivá, who rarely left Rome, relied less on his own talents than on the effectiveness of silent prayer, quiet work and self-sacrifice. When he arrived, in 1946, he spent the first night in Rome in a apartment on the Piazza Citta Leonina – as it happens, in the same building where the future Pope Benedict XVI lived as Cardinal Ratzinger – gazing from his balcony toward Vatican City praying for the person and intentions of Pope Pius XII.
The initial reaction to Opus Dei in Rome was far from encouraging: the first members to speak with officials of the Holy See were told they had come 100 years too soon. Opus Dei did not fit into the categories of the time. The Church was not ready for a new vocation to holiness for the laity in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the workaday world.
Nevertheless, the future arrived much more quickly than anyone suspected in the 1940s, and less than half a century later, Opus Dei was established by Pope John Paul II as the Catholic Church’s first “personal prelature” – a new kind of pastoral jurisdiction of priests and laity under a prelate, but not defined by territorial boundaries like a diocese. Indeed, well before 100 years had passed, its founder was already a saint. Another one of history’s ironies.
* * *
As this anthology should make clear, the message of Opus Dei is, in the words of its founder, as old as the Gospel… and as new. It represents the rediscovery of an old truth, but it also seems to address some of the most characteristic concerns of modernity: the value of human work; the search for meaning in a secularized world; an appreciation of the common man and his quotidian existence.
In a sense, it represents a “popularization” of holiness – not by making it easier, not by “dumbing it down,” but rather by energetically proposing the same high standards for every single baptized Christian. The message of St. Josemaria thus anticipates the words of Pope John Paul II about Christian holiness at the beginning of the third millennium.
A democratic revolution in the realm of sanctity
This ideal of perfection must not be misunderstood as if it involved some kind of extraordinary existence, possible only for a few “uncommon heroes” of holiness. The ways of holiness are many, according to the vocation of each individual. I thank the Lord that in these years he has enabled me to beatify and canonize a large number of Christians, and among them many lay people who attained holiness in the most ordinary circumstances of life. The time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living: the whole life of the Christian community and of Christian families must lead in this direction.(3)
Opus Dei can thus be seen as a democratic revolution in the realm of sanctity. In fact, one cardinal in Rome likes to describe Opus Dei as an ecclesiological “French Revolution”: it is based on the idea that sanctity is not a privilege for an aristocracy or an oligarchy, but an opportunity and a duty for every Christian.
In his work The Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor includes a fascinating chapter entitled “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life,” and the affirmation he speaks of is a characteristically modern reaction to a growing sense of alienation from the quotidian. Modern secular society – commercial, industrialist, capitalistic, technological – has been demystified, drained of all supernatural significance. The world no longer seems to reveal the loving, transcendent hand of God. As Taylor puts it: “In contrast to the fulness of epiphany is the sense of the world around us, as we ordinarily experience it, as out of joint, dead, or forsaken.” (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 422)
And while this daily life may seem devoid of any special meaning, it is – willy-nilly – the place where, for most people, meaning must be found. As a consequence, in today’s world, there is a widespread awareness that the value of ordinary existence must somehow be restored. According to the American novelist Walker Percy, all of the clever contemporary strategies to distract oneself from the quotidian – through travel, sex, entertainment, drugs, novel gnosticisms, consumerized art, the latest gadgetry – are doomed to failure anyway. The ordinary cannot be escaped; it is what we are made for. The solution, says the author of The Moviegoer, lies rather in embracing the ordinary. It requires what Nietzsche might have called a transmutation of values: “It takes,” Percy says, “a conscious cultivation of the ordinary.”(4) Indeed, Opus Dei could be seen as precisely that: a Christian transmutation of values, a Christian cultivation of the ordinary – not as something to flee, but rather as something to embrace. As St. Josemaria says in “Passionately Loving the World”: “There is no other way, my daughters and sons: either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or we shall never find him.”
A Christian “materialism”
The modern world was torn in two by the struggle between communism and capitalism, and in such a contest, the question of the value of human work was bound to be central. It is in this contemporary context that St. Josemaria proposes a new Christian understanding of work that is radically opposed to the dogmatic materialism preached by Marx and the practical materialism often produced by capitalist societies. In “Passionately Loving the World,” he even speaks of a specifically Christian “materialism”.
I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the ’thirties that they had to know how to materialize their spiritual lives. I wanted to warn them of the temptation, so common then and now, to lead a kind of double life: on the one hand, an inner life, a life related to God; and on the other, as something separate and distinct, their professional, social and family lives, made up of small earthly realities. ... We can, therefore, rightly speak of a Christian materialism, which is boldly opposed to those materialisms which are blind to the spirit.
As the selections in this volume demonstrate, St. Josemaria was a gifted writer steeped in the classics of Spanish literature, with the passionate temperament and creative personality of an artist. As a young man, before entering the seminary, he dreamed of being an architect, and throughout his life he was always closely involved – down to the smallest details – in various building projects. During his time in Burgos during the Spanish Civil War, he liked to used the statues on top of the city’s cathedral to explain the spirit of Opus Dei – doing one’s work for God’s eyes – to his first followers. Anyone who has seen his rapidly-executed, cartoon-like sketches of ducks – many are conserved in Rome – can easily see the artistic spontaneity of his personality. So it should not be surprising to hear him express the challenge that Christians face in aesthetic terms. In his homily “Passionately Loving the World,” he asserts that the Christian’s vocation is to make poetry out of the prose of everyday life. He would have understood well – and in an explicitly Christian way – what the poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) meant when he wrote that “the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, and the great poem of earth remains to be written.”(5) One might say that, for St. Josemaria, the Christian is called to do what Vermeer did in painting: transform the stuff of everyday life – the routine, the banal and the commonplace – into a work of divine beauty.
Although the message of Opus Dei may speak with a special force to the modern sensibility, in the end it is – like ordinary life itself – neither ancient nor modern; it belongs to no specific period or culture. It is not really new, and it will never be obsolete. Rather, it is addressed to the human situation as such: to men and women living in the real world, with all its duties, trials and joys. The operative terms of this message – the world, daily work, the family – would be perfectly applicable to Adam and Eve … and all of their descendents. Indeed, St. Josemaria draws our attention to something that perhaps is not part of our standard image of life before the Fall in the Garden of Eden: in the beginning, Adam and Eve were never invited to a life of leisure; even in their “paradise,” there is work to do. As birds fly and fish swim, so man works. St. Josemaria never lets us forgot that man was placed by God in the garden to cultivate it and till it… in short, to work.
Of course, this notion of ordinary life and daily work as part of God’s original plan was renewed for a redeemed mankind by Jesus Christ, who left a model for all his followers to imitate by living most of his life in Nazareth. Working, sweating, buying, selling… he raised these human realities to a higher order. In the recent film, The Passion of the Christ, the gruesome scenes of Christ’s scourging attracted most of the critics’ attention, but there is one scene in the movie that truly resonates with St. Josemaria’s sensibility (indeed, it almost seems as if it were created to illustrate one of his homilies): the quiet flashback in which Jesus is seen making a table and joking around with His mother, Mary. That scene captures the kind of life – in this case, the life, in the eyes of Christian believers, of God’s own Son – that any Christian can live anywhere.
It is also the kind of life that the very first Christians seemed to live, and St. Josemaria frequently used them as a way of explaining Opus Dei. We can get a sense of their unostentatious holiness from the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus, written in the early 2nd century:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives…
Today, after centuries in which it tended to be forgotten, the timeless message that seemed novel and even dangerous in the 1930s is once again clearly the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of the Catholic Catechism: “‘All Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity.’ All are called to holiness: ‘Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’.”(6)
The founder of Opus Dei did not live to see that Catechism or to see Opus Dei established as the Church’s first “personal prelature” in 1982, but he did live to see its message embraced by the Church in the Second Vatican Council, especially in its teaching on the vocation of the laity in the world:
The laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven. In this way they may make Christ known to others, especially by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope and charity. If therefore in the Church everyone does not proceed by the same path, nevertheless all are called to sanctity and have received an equal privilege of faith through the justice of God… For all their works, prayers and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne – all these become “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (Pet 2:5). Together with the offering of the Lord’s body, they are most fittingly offered in the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus, as those everywhere who adore in holy activity, the laity consecrate the world itself to God.(7)
Reading those words in the 1960s, St. Josemaria rejoiced to see Opus Dei’s message confirmed as one of the building blocks of a new culture of sanctity for the Church in the modern age. When, about a decade later, after nearly 50 years dedicated to opening up this new path of holiness, on June 26, 1975, he died of a sudden heart attack, it could not but seem appropriate, in light of his message, that he died in the middle of the day in the office where he worked.
A modern saint
After his death, over one third of the world’s bishops wrote to the Holy See to request the opening of his process of beatification, and in 1992, he was beatified. Ten years later, on October 6, 2002, he was canonized by Pope John Paul II before an immense crowd of over 300,000 pilgrims that filled St. Peter’s Square and the Via della Conciliazione. In that ceremony, the Pope christened him “il santo dell’ordinario – the saint of ordinary life”.
“Don’t let your life be sterile. Be useful. Blaze a trail.” These words – the beginning of the first point of The Way – are St. Josemaria’s first words addressed to the world at large, and, in hindsight, they are advice that their author clearly took to heart.
* * *
After the 1930s, St. Josemaria led a quiet life, but he is probably – at least until the much-anticipated canonization of Pope John Paul II – the most abundantly documented, recorded and filmed saint of all time, in large part because he is one of the first truly modern saints, a saint in the age of airplanes, television, radio and video. Moreover, toward the very end of his life, he became active in a more public way. In 1968, he published a book of lengthy interviews entitled Conversations; the book included, as an appendix, the homily “Passionately Loving the World.” In the early 1970s, he made a series of trips to Spain and Latin America, and many of the multitudinous gatherings there were filmed. Finally, just two years before his death, he published the book Christ is Passing By, a collection homilies following the liturgical year. Not surprisingly, much of the material in this volume comes from this period – the bulk of it from Christ is Passing By and a posthumous collection of homilies on various themes entitled Friends of God.
Although St. Josemaria was a prolific writer, he left no systematic treatises. Instead, his teaching is found in a wide variety of writings spanning almost half a century: letters, diaries, devotional works, homilies, interviews. For this reason, an anthology such as the present one is especially useful: it gleans essential texts from a vast range of sources and puts them all between the covers of one book.
The criteria used for the selections in this anthology were various. Above all, an effort was made to capture the essence of St. Josemaria’s thought, what is unique and distinctive about his teaching. As might be expected, Escrivá wrote and preached extensively on all of the traditional topics of Christian spirituality. Many of those writings are quite beautiful, and some of them are included here, but a preference has been shown for those that – one might say – only he could have written.
While the anthology focuses on longer texts, some briefer points from The Way, Furrow, and The Forge have been included in order to give a fuller sense of St. Josemaria’s personality. The published homilies are by far his most formal works, and their polish sometimes masks the vivacity that is so evident in the film footage and his more colloquial writing. The shorter selections – pithy, colorful, direct, playful – give a taste of his sense of humor, his delight in life’s little details.
The chapters, which could be divided into five sections, are arranged in a specific thematic order.
The first two chapters take their titles and most of their content from two important homilies from 1967: “Passionately Loving the World” and “Toward Holiness.” They both deal with the grand theme of holiness in daily life – the first from the point of view of the Christian’s relationship with the world, the second in terms of the Christian’s intimate relationship with God. They are the closest that St. Josemaria comes to a programmatic presentation of his own teaching, and together they express what is the heart of his message: a new way of pursuing holiness in the middle of the world. They offer an ideal introduction – an overture, as it were – to St. Josemaria’s vision.
The next group of chapters deal with the central loves of St. Josemaria’s life – Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph – and some of the major themes of Opus Dei’s spirituality: divine filiation, contemplative life in the world, the Eucharist (“the center and root of the interior life,” as St. Josemaria often described it), and prayer.
Of course, for St. Josemaria, intimate union with God and heroic holiness are to be pursued in the most concrete situations of everyday life, and the following series of chapters – they deal with such topics as work, family life, friendship and apostolate, Christian charity and suffering – look at how a child of God lives each of these realities in a truly contemplative spirit, transforming the entire day into prayer.
The penultimate group of chapters – “Freedom”, “Joy”, and “Fighting Spirit” – deal with less tangible, more qualitative matters. They attempt to capture the distinctive spiritual tone – the style, so to speak – with which St. Josemaria strove to live.
The final section is a trio of chapters that give a sense of St. Josemaria’s vision in three overlapping contexts: as a Christian in the Church; as a member of Opus Dei; as a soul before a loving, fatherly God. The last of these chapters, which opens a window on St. Josemaria’s intimate life of prayer, is a unique self-portrait of the saint as – of all things – a donkey.
* * *
This book is not a biography or an academic study. It is only an anthology, a representative selection of one man’s words. Along the way, however, it seems that something else has taken shape between the lines. The final product is, in some way, a portrait not only of St. Josemaria Escrivá as an author and personality, but also of the new way of life, for Christians seeking holiness in the workaday world, that he felt called by God to bring into being. In short, in these words of St. Josemaria, we undoubtedly see and hear him, but we also see what he was about, the raison d’être of his life. This was probably inevitable, since he himself often spoke of doing Opus Dei by being Opus Dei. In this sense, any truthful portrait of St. Josemaria will necessarily be a portrait of Opus Dei in nucleo.
In the passages collected in this anthology, through the example of St. Josemaria, it should be possible, then, for the reader to discern a specific culture of sanctity taking its first steps along a new path for Christians who, with the help of a light thrown by St. Josemaria upon one of Chesterton’s “riddles” of the Gospel, strive to be saints and apostles in the middle of the modern world.
John Wauck*,
Rome, October 2, 2008
* Fr. Wauck, born in Chicago, is a priest of the Opus Dei prelature. He studied renaissance history at Harvard, took a doctorate in philosophy, and currently teaches a course on literature and Christian faith at the Faculty of Social and Institutional Communication at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Before becoming a priest he worked as a speechwriter for the US attorney general and the governor of Pennsylvania.
For publisher’s details see www.lindau.it
(1) Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925.
(2) Josemaria Escrivá, “Working for God,” in Friends of God, 56
(3) Novo Millennio Ineunte, 31.
(4) New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item, 4 Sept. 1980, quoted in Lewis A. Lawson and Victor Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985) p.4.
(5) Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1951). A lawyer who spent his whole life working, at an executive level, for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, Stevens himself knew “ordinary life” from the inside. He was also, at the end of his life, a convert to Catholicism.
(6) The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2013, citing Vatican II (Lumen Gentium 40) and the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 5:48).
(7) Lumen Gentium 31, 32, 34.
The following is an English version of the introduction, in which Fr. Wauck discusses St Josemaria’s personality and the context in which Opus Dei first saw the light.
The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
“Reply to Papini”, Wallace Stevens
General Introduction
The Work of God
In the year 1925, in his magnum opus, The Everlasting Man, the English author G.K. Chesterton drew attention to what he called the “riddles” of the Gospel, and, speaking about the thirty mysterious years of Jesus Christ’s so-called “hidden life” in Nazareth, he observed:
It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and nobody so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable.(1)
Little did the creator of the Fr. Brown detective stories know, but soon a young Spanish priest from the provincial town of Barbastro in northeastern Spain would discover a profound meaning in those “forgotten” years, finding in them a model for a radically new path of holiness in the Catholic Church. It was just three years later, in 1928, that the 26-year-old priest, Josemaria Escrivá, clearly saw the task to which he would dedicate his life: the search for sanctity in the middle of the world, through one’s ordinary daily life, following the example of Jesus Christ’s years as a carpenter in Nazareth. To the eyes of Fr. Escrivá, the years that Chesterton found so impressively opaque were full of illuminating lessons:
Our Lord’s whole life fills me with love for him, but I have a special weakness for his thirty hidden years spent in Bethlehem, Egypt and Nazareth. That period, so long in comparison with his public life and which the Gospels hardly mention, might seem empty of any special meaning to a person who views it superficially. And yet, I have always maintained that this silence about Our Lord’s early life speaks eloquently for itself and contains a wonderful lesson for us Christians. They were years of intense work and prayer, years during which Jesus led an ordinary life, a life like ours, we might say, which was both divine and human at the same time. In his simple workshop, unnoticed, he did everything to perfection, just as he was later to do before the multitudes.(2)
The new way of seeking holiness would be called “Opus Dei” (Latin for God’s Work), and it would spread throughout the entire world. In 2002, the young priest, whose writings are anthologized in this volume, would enter the Church’s liturgical calendar as Saint Josemaria Escrivá.
Domine ut videam!
Born in Barbastro, in the province of Aragon, on January 9, 1902, Escrivá grew up there and in Logroño, where his family moved in 1915, after the failure of his father’s business in Barbastro. Inspired by the sight of footprints in the snow left by a barefoot Carmelite friar, the teenage Josemaria decided that God was asking something special of him and, in order to prepare himself, he entered the local seminary, studying there and later in Zaragoza, where he also studied civil law (he would eventually receive doctorates in both canon and civil law).
When his father died in 1924, Escrivá, not yet a deacon, found himself the head of his family, responsible for the welfare of his mother, older sister and younger brother (three younger sisters had died of influenza in the years preceding the First World War). In March of 1925, he was ordained a priest and, after working for two years in the diocese of Zaragoza, he moved with his family to Madrid to continue his legal studies. While in Madrid, he was chaplain of a charitable foundation, and he worked extensively in the hospitals and poorer neighborhoods, teaching catechism, hearing confessions, and assisting the dying. All the while, he was asking God to make clear His will: during these years, the cry of Bartimaeus, the blind man in the Gospels – Domine, ut videam! Lord, that I might see! – was his constant prayer.
About a year after arriving in the capital, on October 2, 1928, while making a spiritual retreat, he finally saw the special task that God was entrusting to him. This was the turning point in his life: from that point on, the biography of Josemaria Escrivá is inseparable from the history of Opus Dei.
What “world” did he have in mind?
In many of the selections in this volume, when Escrivá speaks of Opus Dei, he talks about finding God in and through the things and events of the secular world, and the reader may well ask: what “world” did he have in mind? What was the world that he knew?
Opus Dei came into being between the two great wars, amid the sundry affairs and dramatic changes of the late 1920s. It was a time of transition and turmoil, of traditions abandoned and re-discovered. In 1928, the year that St. Josemaria was founding Opus Dei, his contemporaries and compatriots, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, were making the classic surrealist film Un chien andalou. In that same year, a Catholic convert, the Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, author of Kristin Lavransdatter, won the Nobel Prize for literature. Another recent Catholic convert, Ernest Hemingway, was finishing A Farewell to Arms. Evelyn Waugh, on the verge of converting to Catholicism, was publishing his first novel, Decline and Fall.
The previous year, Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo flight across that same ocean, the Austrian film director Fritz Lang made his masterpiece, Metropolis, and Al Jolson’s movie The Jazz Singer announced the end of the silent era in cinema with the famous words “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”
A year later, a catastrophic stock market crash would usher in the Great Depression and, in Italy, the signing of the Lateran Pact would end the pope’s long decades as a “prisoner of the Vatican.” On the Iberian peninsula, political tensions were leading Spain toward a bloody civil war that would touch St. Josemaria and Opus Dei very directly.
This, one might say, is “the world” as St. Josemaria knew it, and far from being aloof from such contemporary events, the founder of Opus Dei was deeply immersed in them. His diaries from the 1930s reveal that he was such an avid reader of the daily papers that he had to work hard to control his thirst for the latest news. More importantly, he came to see that it was precisely this world that had to be made a home for contemplation, a place for a personal encounter with God. In this volume (in the chapter on “Children of God”), one can read St. Josemaria’s own account of the most sublime prayer that he ever enjoyed. It occurred on October 16, 1932, not long after the founding of Opus Dei, in the early days of the Second Spanish Republic. In view of Opus Dei’s message, it is remarkably fitting that this period of intense prayer took place not in a church or on a mountaintop, but on a tram, while St. Josemaria was reading a newspaper. Its emblematic significance was not lost on him.
His remarkable faith
What is most striking, however, about the early years of Opus Dei is the remarkable faith of its young founder. Bringing a new institution to life in this period of intense political passions, bold creativity and great uncertainty on many fronts (social, economic, cultural), he faced serious obstacles. The priest, who had his own family to support, had no economic resources. As he frequently said, when Opus Dei began, he had absolutely nothing but God’s grace and a good sense of humor. In the beginning, he was misunderstood. The novelty of his message led others to call him a heretic and a madman. Vocations were slow in coming, and several of the first few members either left Opus Dei or died prematurely. Then, in 1936, came the Spanish Civil War. As a result, the handful of early members was scattered throughout Spain. Religious persecution in the Republican zone, which claimed the lives of thousands of priests and a dozen bishops, forced Escrivá himself to go into hiding at the start of the war and, late in 1937, to flee through the Pyrenees into France, eventually settling in Burgos on the other side of the front.
When the Civil War ended in 1939, the only center of Opus Dei was a bombed-out ruin in Madrid, and the 37-year-old founder had almost nothing to show for more than a decade of work. And yet, his writings from this period reveal not a sense of discouragement, but rather his unshakable conviction that, because it was God’s work and not his own, Opus Dei was destined to grow and spread throughout the entire world. One fruit that did emerge from the war years was his first and most famous book, Camino (The Way), a collection of 999 points for reflection and prayer, published in 1939. It has sold well over a million copies.
Rome. A night praying for the Pope
As soon as World War II ended, St. Josemaria moved to Rome, and the Eternal City remained his home for the rest of his life. The same faith that he needed in Spain was evident during his Roman years. Before it could be approved by the Holy See and find its proper place in the structure of the Church, the new organization had to overcome major canonical and institutional hurdles. To lead Opus Dei forward on this juridical journey and in its apostolate around the world (these were the years of Opus Dei’s expansion throughout Europe and the Americas), Escrivá, who rarely left Rome, relied less on his own talents than on the effectiveness of silent prayer, quiet work and self-sacrifice. When he arrived, in 1946, he spent the first night in Rome in a apartment on the Piazza Citta Leonina – as it happens, in the same building where the future Pope Benedict XVI lived as Cardinal Ratzinger – gazing from his balcony toward Vatican City praying for the person and intentions of Pope Pius XII.
The initial reaction to Opus Dei in Rome was far from encouraging: the first members to speak with officials of the Holy See were told they had come 100 years too soon. Opus Dei did not fit into the categories of the time. The Church was not ready for a new vocation to holiness for the laity in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the workaday world.
Nevertheless, the future arrived much more quickly than anyone suspected in the 1940s, and less than half a century later, Opus Dei was established by Pope John Paul II as the Catholic Church’s first “personal prelature” – a new kind of pastoral jurisdiction of priests and laity under a prelate, but not defined by territorial boundaries like a diocese. Indeed, well before 100 years had passed, its founder was already a saint. Another one of history’s ironies.
* * *
As this anthology should make clear, the message of Opus Dei is, in the words of its founder, as old as the Gospel… and as new. It represents the rediscovery of an old truth, but it also seems to address some of the most characteristic concerns of modernity: the value of human work; the search for meaning in a secularized world; an appreciation of the common man and his quotidian existence.
In a sense, it represents a “popularization” of holiness – not by making it easier, not by “dumbing it down,” but rather by energetically proposing the same high standards for every single baptized Christian. The message of St. Josemaria thus anticipates the words of Pope John Paul II about Christian holiness at the beginning of the third millennium.
A democratic revolution in the realm of sanctity
This ideal of perfection must not be misunderstood as if it involved some kind of extraordinary existence, possible only for a few “uncommon heroes” of holiness. The ways of holiness are many, according to the vocation of each individual. I thank the Lord that in these years he has enabled me to beatify and canonize a large number of Christians, and among them many lay people who attained holiness in the most ordinary circumstances of life. The time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living: the whole life of the Christian community and of Christian families must lead in this direction.(3)
Opus Dei can thus be seen as a democratic revolution in the realm of sanctity. In fact, one cardinal in Rome likes to describe Opus Dei as an ecclesiological “French Revolution”: it is based on the idea that sanctity is not a privilege for an aristocracy or an oligarchy, but an opportunity and a duty for every Christian.
In his work The Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor includes a fascinating chapter entitled “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life,” and the affirmation he speaks of is a characteristically modern reaction to a growing sense of alienation from the quotidian. Modern secular society – commercial, industrialist, capitalistic, technological – has been demystified, drained of all supernatural significance. The world no longer seems to reveal the loving, transcendent hand of God. As Taylor puts it: “In contrast to the fulness of epiphany is the sense of the world around us, as we ordinarily experience it, as out of joint, dead, or forsaken.” (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 422)
And while this daily life may seem devoid of any special meaning, it is – willy-nilly – the place where, for most people, meaning must be found. As a consequence, in today’s world, there is a widespread awareness that the value of ordinary existence must somehow be restored. According to the American novelist Walker Percy, all of the clever contemporary strategies to distract oneself from the quotidian – through travel, sex, entertainment, drugs, novel gnosticisms, consumerized art, the latest gadgetry – are doomed to failure anyway. The ordinary cannot be escaped; it is what we are made for. The solution, says the author of The Moviegoer, lies rather in embracing the ordinary. It requires what Nietzsche might have called a transmutation of values: “It takes,” Percy says, “a conscious cultivation of the ordinary.”(4) Indeed, Opus Dei could be seen as precisely that: a Christian transmutation of values, a Christian cultivation of the ordinary – not as something to flee, but rather as something to embrace. As St. Josemaria says in “Passionately Loving the World”: “There is no other way, my daughters and sons: either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or we shall never find him.”
A Christian “materialism”
The modern world was torn in two by the struggle between communism and capitalism, and in such a contest, the question of the value of human work was bound to be central. It is in this contemporary context that St. Josemaria proposes a new Christian understanding of work that is radically opposed to the dogmatic materialism preached by Marx and the practical materialism often produced by capitalist societies. In “Passionately Loving the World,” he even speaks of a specifically Christian “materialism”.
I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the ’thirties that they had to know how to materialize their spiritual lives. I wanted to warn them of the temptation, so common then and now, to lead a kind of double life: on the one hand, an inner life, a life related to God; and on the other, as something separate and distinct, their professional, social and family lives, made up of small earthly realities. ... We can, therefore, rightly speak of a Christian materialism, which is boldly opposed to those materialisms which are blind to the spirit.
As the selections in this volume demonstrate, St. Josemaria was a gifted writer steeped in the classics of Spanish literature, with the passionate temperament and creative personality of an artist. As a young man, before entering the seminary, he dreamed of being an architect, and throughout his life he was always closely involved – down to the smallest details – in various building projects. During his time in Burgos during the Spanish Civil War, he liked to used the statues on top of the city’s cathedral to explain the spirit of Opus Dei – doing one’s work for God’s eyes – to his first followers. Anyone who has seen his rapidly-executed, cartoon-like sketches of ducks – many are conserved in Rome – can easily see the artistic spontaneity of his personality. So it should not be surprising to hear him express the challenge that Christians face in aesthetic terms. In his homily “Passionately Loving the World,” he asserts that the Christian’s vocation is to make poetry out of the prose of everyday life. He would have understood well – and in an explicitly Christian way – what the poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) meant when he wrote that “the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, and the great poem of earth remains to be written.”(5) One might say that, for St. Josemaria, the Christian is called to do what Vermeer did in painting: transform the stuff of everyday life – the routine, the banal and the commonplace – into a work of divine beauty.
Although the message of Opus Dei may speak with a special force to the modern sensibility, in the end it is – like ordinary life itself – neither ancient nor modern; it belongs to no specific period or culture. It is not really new, and it will never be obsolete. Rather, it is addressed to the human situation as such: to men and women living in the real world, with all its duties, trials and joys. The operative terms of this message – the world, daily work, the family – would be perfectly applicable to Adam and Eve … and all of their descendents. Indeed, St. Josemaria draws our attention to something that perhaps is not part of our standard image of life before the Fall in the Garden of Eden: in the beginning, Adam and Eve were never invited to a life of leisure; even in their “paradise,” there is work to do. As birds fly and fish swim, so man works. St. Josemaria never lets us forgot that man was placed by God in the garden to cultivate it and till it… in short, to work.
Of course, this notion of ordinary life and daily work as part of God’s original plan was renewed for a redeemed mankind by Jesus Christ, who left a model for all his followers to imitate by living most of his life in Nazareth. Working, sweating, buying, selling… he raised these human realities to a higher order. In the recent film, The Passion of the Christ, the gruesome scenes of Christ’s scourging attracted most of the critics’ attention, but there is one scene in the movie that truly resonates with St. Josemaria’s sensibility (indeed, it almost seems as if it were created to illustrate one of his homilies): the quiet flashback in which Jesus is seen making a table and joking around with His mother, Mary. That scene captures the kind of life – in this case, the life, in the eyes of Christian believers, of God’s own Son – that any Christian can live anywhere.
It is also the kind of life that the very first Christians seemed to live, and St. Josemaria frequently used them as a way of explaining Opus Dei. We can get a sense of their unostentatious holiness from the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus, written in the early 2nd century:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives…
Today, after centuries in which it tended to be forgotten, the timeless message that seemed novel and even dangerous in the 1930s is once again clearly the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of the Catholic Catechism: “‘All Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity.’ All are called to holiness: ‘Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’.”(6)
The founder of Opus Dei did not live to see that Catechism or to see Opus Dei established as the Church’s first “personal prelature” in 1982, but he did live to see its message embraced by the Church in the Second Vatican Council, especially in its teaching on the vocation of the laity in the world:
The laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven. In this way they may make Christ known to others, especially by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope and charity. If therefore in the Church everyone does not proceed by the same path, nevertheless all are called to sanctity and have received an equal privilege of faith through the justice of God… For all their works, prayers and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne – all these become “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (Pet 2:5). Together with the offering of the Lord’s body, they are most fittingly offered in the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus, as those everywhere who adore in holy activity, the laity consecrate the world itself to God.(7)
Reading those words in the 1960s, St. Josemaria rejoiced to see Opus Dei’s message confirmed as one of the building blocks of a new culture of sanctity for the Church in the modern age. When, about a decade later, after nearly 50 years dedicated to opening up this new path of holiness, on June 26, 1975, he died of a sudden heart attack, it could not but seem appropriate, in light of his message, that he died in the middle of the day in the office where he worked.
A modern saint
After his death, over one third of the world’s bishops wrote to the Holy See to request the opening of his process of beatification, and in 1992, he was beatified. Ten years later, on October 6, 2002, he was canonized by Pope John Paul II before an immense crowd of over 300,000 pilgrims that filled St. Peter’s Square and the Via della Conciliazione. In that ceremony, the Pope christened him “il santo dell’ordinario – the saint of ordinary life”.
“Don’t let your life be sterile. Be useful. Blaze a trail.” These words – the beginning of the first point of The Way – are St. Josemaria’s first words addressed to the world at large, and, in hindsight, they are advice that their author clearly took to heart.
* * *
After the 1930s, St. Josemaria led a quiet life, but he is probably – at least until the much-anticipated canonization of Pope John Paul II – the most abundantly documented, recorded and filmed saint of all time, in large part because he is one of the first truly modern saints, a saint in the age of airplanes, television, radio and video. Moreover, toward the very end of his life, he became active in a more public way. In 1968, he published a book of lengthy interviews entitled Conversations; the book included, as an appendix, the homily “Passionately Loving the World.” In the early 1970s, he made a series of trips to Spain and Latin America, and many of the multitudinous gatherings there were filmed. Finally, just two years before his death, he published the book Christ is Passing By, a collection homilies following the liturgical year. Not surprisingly, much of the material in this volume comes from this period – the bulk of it from Christ is Passing By and a posthumous collection of homilies on various themes entitled Friends of God.
Although St. Josemaria was a prolific writer, he left no systematic treatises. Instead, his teaching is found in a wide variety of writings spanning almost half a century: letters, diaries, devotional works, homilies, interviews. For this reason, an anthology such as the present one is especially useful: it gleans essential texts from a vast range of sources and puts them all between the covers of one book.
The criteria used for the selections in this anthology were various. Above all, an effort was made to capture the essence of St. Josemaria’s thought, what is unique and distinctive about his teaching. As might be expected, Escrivá wrote and preached extensively on all of the traditional topics of Christian spirituality. Many of those writings are quite beautiful, and some of them are included here, but a preference has been shown for those that – one might say – only he could have written.
While the anthology focuses on longer texts, some briefer points from The Way, Furrow, and The Forge have been included in order to give a fuller sense of St. Josemaria’s personality. The published homilies are by far his most formal works, and their polish sometimes masks the vivacity that is so evident in the film footage and his more colloquial writing. The shorter selections – pithy, colorful, direct, playful – give a taste of his sense of humor, his delight in life’s little details.
The chapters, which could be divided into five sections, are arranged in a specific thematic order.
The first two chapters take their titles and most of their content from two important homilies from 1967: “Passionately Loving the World” and “Toward Holiness.” They both deal with the grand theme of holiness in daily life – the first from the point of view of the Christian’s relationship with the world, the second in terms of the Christian’s intimate relationship with God. They are the closest that St. Josemaria comes to a programmatic presentation of his own teaching, and together they express what is the heart of his message: a new way of pursuing holiness in the middle of the world. They offer an ideal introduction – an overture, as it were – to St. Josemaria’s vision.
The next group of chapters deal with the central loves of St. Josemaria’s life – Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph – and some of the major themes of Opus Dei’s spirituality: divine filiation, contemplative life in the world, the Eucharist (“the center and root of the interior life,” as St. Josemaria often described it), and prayer.
Of course, for St. Josemaria, intimate union with God and heroic holiness are to be pursued in the most concrete situations of everyday life, and the following series of chapters – they deal with such topics as work, family life, friendship and apostolate, Christian charity and suffering – look at how a child of God lives each of these realities in a truly contemplative spirit, transforming the entire day into prayer.
The penultimate group of chapters – “Freedom”, “Joy”, and “Fighting Spirit” – deal with less tangible, more qualitative matters. They attempt to capture the distinctive spiritual tone – the style, so to speak – with which St. Josemaria strove to live.
The final section is a trio of chapters that give a sense of St. Josemaria’s vision in three overlapping contexts: as a Christian in the Church; as a member of Opus Dei; as a soul before a loving, fatherly God. The last of these chapters, which opens a window on St. Josemaria’s intimate life of prayer, is a unique self-portrait of the saint as – of all things – a donkey.
* * *
This book is not a biography or an academic study. It is only an anthology, a representative selection of one man’s words. Along the way, however, it seems that something else has taken shape between the lines. The final product is, in some way, a portrait not only of St. Josemaria Escrivá as an author and personality, but also of the new way of life, for Christians seeking holiness in the workaday world, that he felt called by God to bring into being. In short, in these words of St. Josemaria, we undoubtedly see and hear him, but we also see what he was about, the raison d’être of his life. This was probably inevitable, since he himself often spoke of doing Opus Dei by being Opus Dei. In this sense, any truthful portrait of St. Josemaria will necessarily be a portrait of Opus Dei in nucleo.
In the passages collected in this anthology, through the example of St. Josemaria, it should be possible, then, for the reader to discern a specific culture of sanctity taking its first steps along a new path for Christians who, with the help of a light thrown by St. Josemaria upon one of Chesterton’s “riddles” of the Gospel, strive to be saints and apostles in the middle of the modern world.
John Wauck*,
Rome, October 2, 2008
* Fr. Wauck, born in Chicago, is a priest of the Opus Dei prelature. He studied renaissance history at Harvard, took a doctorate in philosophy, and currently teaches a course on literature and Christian faith at the Faculty of Social and Institutional Communication at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Before becoming a priest he worked as a speechwriter for the US attorney general and the governor of Pennsylvania.
For publisher’s details see www.lindau.it
(1) Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925.
(2) Josemaria Escrivá, “Working for God,” in Friends of God, 56
(3) Novo Millennio Ineunte, 31.
(4) New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item, 4 Sept. 1980, quoted in Lewis A. Lawson and Victor Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985) p.4.
(5) Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1951). A lawyer who spent his whole life working, at an executive level, for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, Stevens himself knew “ordinary life” from the inside. He was also, at the end of his life, a convert to Catholicism.
(6) The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2013, citing Vatican II (Lumen Gentium 40) and the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 5:48).
(7) Lumen Gentium 31, 32, 34.
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