Benedict XVI on Opus Dei

By Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, October 6, 2002. An article by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, published on the occasion of the canonization of Josemaría Escrivá. This is one of the best and most concise explanations of Opus Dei.

I have always been struck by the interpretation which Josemaría Escrivá gave of the name Opus Dei—an interpretation which we could call biographical and which allows us to understand the founder in his spiritual dimension. Escrivá knew that he should found something, but he was always aware that whatever it was was not his work, that he had not invented anything, that the Lord had simply made use of him. Thus it was not his work, but Opus Dei [Latin for "work of God"]. He was only an instrument with which God had acted.

While I was pondering this fact, there came to mind the words of the Lord reported in the Gospel of John (5:17): “My Father is always working.” These are words spoken by Jesus in the course of a discussion with some religious specialists who did not want to recognize that God could act even on the Sabbath. This is a debate that is still going on, in a certain way, among people and even Christians of our own time. Some people think that after creation God “retired” and no longer has any interest in our everyday affairs. According to this manner of thinking, God could no longer enter into the fabric of our daily life. But the words of Jesus affirm the opposite. A man open to the presence of God discovers that God is always working and still works today: We should, then, let him enter and let him work. And so things are born which open to the future and renew mankind.

All this helps us to understand why Josemaría Escrivá did not consider himself “founder” of anything, but only a person who wants to fulfill the will of God, to second his action, the work, precisely, of God. In this sense, the theocentrism of Escrivá, in accordance with the words of Jesus, means this confidence in the fact that God has not retired from the world, that God is working now and we ought only to put ourselves at his disposal, to be ready, capable of reacting to his calling. This, for me, is a message of greatest importance. It is a message which leads to overcoming what could be considered the great temptation of our times: the pretense, that is, that after the "big bang" God retired from history. God’s action did not “stop” at the moment of the "big bang", but continues throughout time in the world of nature and the world of man.

The founder of Opus Dei said: I am not the one who invented anything; there is Another who acts, and I am only ready to serve as an instrument. So the name, and all the reality which we call Opus Dei, is deeply bound up with the interior life of the founder. He, while remaining very discreet on this point, makes us understand that he was in permanent dialogue, in real contact, with Him who created us and works through us and with us. The Book of Exodus (33:11) says of Moses that God spoke with him “face to face, as a friend speaks with a friend.” I think that, even if the veil of discretion hides many details from us, still from some small references we can very well apply to Josemaría Escrivá this “speaking as a friend speaks with a friend,” which opens the doors of the world so that God can become present, to work and transform everything.

In this light one can understand even better what holiness means, as well as the universal calling to holiness. Knowing a little about the history of saints, and understanding that in the causes of canonization there is inquiry into “heroic” virtue, we almost inevitably have a mistaken concept of holiness: “It is not for me,” we are led to think, “because I do not feel capable of attaining heroic virtue. It is too high a goal.” Holiness then becomes a thing reserved for some “greats” whose images we see on the altars, and who are completely different from us ordinary sinners. But this is a mistaken notion of holiness, a wrong perception which has been corrected—and this seems to me the central point—precisely by Josemaría Escrivá.

Heroic virtue does not mean that the saint performs a type of “gymnastics” of holiness, something that normal people do not dare to do. It means rather that in the life of a person God’s presence is revealed—something man could not do by himself and through himself. Perhaps in the final analysis we are rather dealing with a question of terminology, because the adjective “heroic” has been badly interpreted. Heroic virtue properly speaking does not mean that one has done great things by oneself, but rather that in one’s life there appear realities which the person has not done himself, because he has been transparent and ready for the work of God. Or, in other words, to be a saint is nothing other than to speak with God as a friend speaks with a friend. This is holiness.

To be holy does not mean being superior to others; the saint can be very weak, with many mistakes in his life. Holiness is this profound contact with God, becoming a friend of God: it is letting the Other work, the Only One who can really make the world both good and happy. And if, then, Josemaría Escrivá speaks of the calling of all to be saints, I think that he is actually referring to this personal experience of his of not having done incredible things by himself, but of having let God work. And thus was born a renewal, a force for good in the world, even if all the weaknesses of mankind will remain ever present. Truly we are all capable, we are all called to open ourselves up to this friendship with God, to not leave the hands of God, to not neglect to turn and return to the Lord, speaking with him as if speaking with a friend, knowing well that the Lord really is a true friend of everyone, including those who cannot do great things by themselves.

From all this I have better understood the inner character of Opus Dei, this surprising union of absolute fidelity to the Church’s great tradition, to its faith, and unconditional openness to all the challenges of this world, whether in the academic world, in the field of work, or in matters of the economy, etc. The person who is bound to God, who has this uninterrupted conversation, can dare to respond to these challenges, and no longer has fear. For the person who stands in God’s hands always falls into God’s hands. And so fear vanishes, and in its place is born the courage to respond to today’s world.

Christian-bashing: the last acceptable bigotry

By Charles Moore in The Telegraph-Journal. Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotia based freelance writer and editor whose column appears weekly at the Telegraph-Journal.

Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe's attack on a Quebec Conservative candidate over her membership in the Catholic prelature Opus Dei, and lack of any consequential significant expression of media censure or popular outrage, further underscores that Christian-bashing is the one remaining socially-acceptable form of discrimination and intolerance in Canada.

While it's unremarkable that Mr. Duceppe, a former communist and still thoroughgoing left-winger, despises traditionalist Christianity, that his criticism of Nicole Charbonneau Barron, Conservative candidate in the Montreal-area riding of St. Bruno-St. Hubert, for her Opus Dei affiliation received only cursory and passing mention from the commentariat speaks volumes about popular acceptance of anti-Christian bigotry in our increasingly secular humanist culture.

Opus Dei, you see, adheres faithfully to official Catholic doctrine condemning abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, unlike some (more socially acceptable) "cafeteria Catholics" who imagine they can legitimately pick and choose among which Church doctrines and moral teachings they will affirm or oppose. The mission statement of the organization, founded in 1928 by Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002, is "to spread the message that work and the circumstances of everyday life are occasions for growing closer to God, for serving others, and for improving society."

Opus Dei's first Canadian member was Jacques Bonneville of Montreal who established the group's work there in Canada in 1957 at the invitation of Cardinal Paul-Emile Léger. There are now an estimated 600 Opus Dei members in this country (some 87,000 worldwide), mostly married men and women, as well as approximately 1,600 co-operators who pray for the group's work and help with apostolic initiatives, including programs for young people, professionals, and families such as seminars for high school students, parenting courses, summer camps, and student residences at several universities intended to provide an environment for Christian formation and help participants become "sowers of peace and joy." There are now 16 Opus Dei centres in five Canadian cities: Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver.

Opus Dei was viciously slandered in Dan Brown's amateurishly-written but wildly popular pulp-fiction fantasy novel The Da Vinci Code and the 2006 Tom Hanks film derived from it, in which the organization is caricatured as a sinister, murderous cult, a stereotype Mr. Duceppe presumably sought to channel with his assault on Ms. Barron's religious beliefs.

While he didn't call for Ms. Barron to resign as a parliamentary candidate, Duceppe was clearly fear-mongering in attempting to portray her as a member of a "secret society" with an agenda to impose "fundamentalist" Christian views on Parliament. That's pretty much lib-left boilerplate referencing any devout Christian participating in public life, but what especially rankles is that had Mr. Duceppe delivered a similar critique of the religious beliefs of, say, a Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or Sikh candidate, the political correctness brigades would have been over him like flies on a garbage truck, condemning him as an in tolerant racist. However, attack serious Christianity and the silence is deafening.

The double-standard is infuriating. It's become abundantly clear that at least among media chatterati, devout Christians are about as welcome in electoral politics as fire ants at a picnic, the message being that Christian social conservatives should be disqualified from holding political power and influence because in the estimation of lib-left self-appointed elites they are moral interventionists promoting hidden agendas - ideologically out of sync with a society allegedly comprised mainly of social liberals. The further implication is that religious people who actually take seriously and try to practice the principles, standards, and doctrines of their faith must be relegated to second-class citizenship. A topical example is the bleating from stage left over U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's evangelical/pentecostal faith affiliation.

To draw a clearer bead on just how offensive this trope is, try inserting the words "Jew" or "Jewish" in place of "Christian" or "social conservative," or "religious right" in news reports and commentaries expressing shock and alarm that "fundamentalist" Christians are actually participating in the political process.

Sounds ugly, doesn't it? So why do secular humanists think it's perfectly OK to say such things about Christians seeking office? It's nothing less than selective, left-wing, secularist bigotry.

A struggle within our reach

By a priest of Midwestern United States in his blog, Clerical Reform.

I received a question about the quote from St. Josemaria appearing in the blog header: "A priest should be exclusively a man of God. He should reject any desire to shine in areas where other Christians do not need him."

St. Josemaria is quite a lightning rod. He is loved and revered as well as hated and reviled. It is in not enough to say, "So was our Lord." His model of priestly service is amazing on its own terms. He was sinful man, a broken man, a man whose sins were borne on the Holy Cross. Yet, he is also a saint. This ought to give us great comfort. This is not to say that we ought to embrace sin. It is rather to say that there is no place for discouragement. Yes, we shall sin. Yes, we have sinned. Yes, our sins make us foolish. However, they are not stronger than Jesus Christ. If we submit to Him and not to the sin, sanctity may be in our reach as well. Here's a quote that I think sums up St. Josemaria and his view on this:

"The Church, the souls, of all continents, of all times present and to come, expect a lot from you... But you should have it very firmly fixed in your head and in your heart that you will be fruitless if you are not a saint or, let me put it better, if you don’t struggle to be a saint." (From The Forge, 873)

Our job as priests is not perfection; it is the struggle for perfection. The struggle is within our reach.

My experience of Opus Dei

By David in Methodist Preacher. David is a preacher in the Birmingham West and Oldbury Circuit of the Methodist Church (UK).

The long planned resignation of Transport Minister Ruth Kelly has once again seen her alleged membership of the Roman Catholic group Opus Dei bought into the spotlight.

I must admit when Ruth was first appointed a Minister I felt uncomfortable with the implication in some quarters that her strong Catholic faith ruled her out from political office in a Labour government.

Now I'm no expert on the Catholic side of things but I'm aware that Opus Dei has always had something of a reputation and few years ago I was surprised to find myself providing a short training session for them.

A small part of my professional life is providing public speaking and media training. It isn't my main business but it brings in a few days work here and there, always useful.

One day I got a phone call and was asked if I could provide an afternoon's public speaking session to a woman's church group conference. I gather they had been let down and needed someone at short notice. By one of those astonishingly strange coincidences I had an appointment in the same city that morning.

Perhaps I should have asked a few more questions but was delighted that a church organisation was prepared to use my skills and halved my fee. On reflection the lady who telephoned me was a little vague.

Eventually I arrived just after lunch at a massive house in a suburb of Glasgow. My immediate impression was that there was a lovely atmosphere about the place and I felt welcomed.

What interested me about the thirty or forty people at the conference is that they genuinely spanned all age groups. I think of the words "woman's church group" and my Methodist mind defaults to a gathering of women in their late fifties and beyond. There were women in their 50s and 60s but there was also a strong representation of women in their late 20s and 30s. They seemed really nice, kind people.

Anyway I did my presentation, took a few questions, and joined them for afternoon tea. It was only when I was handed my fee that the organiser explained that this was an Opus Dei conference and offered me some literature about the controversial founder of the group Josemaria Escriva recently canonised by John Paul II.

I must admit I was a bit taken aback but certainly didn't feel I was meeting a group who were in any way sinister or fanatic. I haven't been asked to do anymore work for them but I now question the knee-jerk reaction of many who immediately denounce Opus Dei. I can understand how it provides the same sort of support that Bible study and house groups provide in a Methodist context. I feel sad that Ruth Kelly's alleged links have been used against her.

By David, a Methodist preacher in UK.

Opus Dei: No albino killers

By Michael Coren in the National Post. Coren is a respected Canadian columnist, author, public speaker, radio host and television talk show host.

We face an election conducted through the prism of sensationalist fiction or, to put it another way, the dictatorship of the novel. In this case a bad novel. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has largely been forgotten but its grotesque caricature of Catholic organization Opus Dei has left a cloud of absurd misunderstanding around this group, whose main crime appears to be orthodoxy. For Dan Brown, Opus Dei, Latin for the work of God, signified crazed albino assassins running around France, secret plots, dark intrigue and self-flagellation. In fact, it’s more charity missions in slums, schools, religious retreats for busy people and work for the poor.

But Dan Brown is evidently big in Quebec and, much to the chagrin of the Bloc, so might be the Conservatives. Accordingly, Gilles Duceppe announced that the Tory candidate in Saint-Hubert-Saint-Bruno, Nicole Charbonneau Barron, was an Opus Dei member. Then Raymond Gravel, a Catholic priest and outgoing Bloc MP, opined that, “Social conservatives such as members of Opus Dei may be running for office in order to change policies concerning abortion and same-sex marriage.”

Earth to dotty separatist: It’s not Opus Dei but the Roman Catholic Church that teaches that life begins at conception and that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. You might know that if you weren’t suspended from almost all priestly duties. Indeed it is entirely likely that in a less liberal place than Quebec in the 1980s, this former prostitute who worked in Montreal’s gay leather bars would never have been ordained in the first place.

The more important point is that this is a game of gutter politics being played by frightened politicians. Opus Dei is entirely faithful to Catholic teaching, so if anyone objects to its people standing for office they should really say what they mean — that genuine Catholics are not welcome. That, however, might be too much even for the most ardent followers of the new religion of state secularism.

Opus Dei was founded by Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva in 1928, as a largely lay organization of Roman Catholics with the purpose of sanctifying ordinary work. The holy is within everyday people doing everyday things, wrote the founder, but they need guidance. It is now an international group with houses and followers throughout the world. It has more than 80,000 members, 1,800 of them priests. In Canada there are around 500 members, but the number of followers is dozens of times larger. It is also a Personal Prelature of the Pope, which means it has clout.

Opus Dei is traditional: the sacraments, the Rosary, the adoration of the Virgin Mary and the saints, strict moral discipline. It’s what would have been considered average Catholicism just a few years ago, before “Catholics” such as Duceppe and Gravel came to prominence. It is growing particularly fast in Toronto, with a high school and a male and a female hall of residence catering to university students. Actual membership is not easy and most of its adherents simply go along for evenings of “recollection.” Others, however, commit themselves to celibacy and devote a certain part of their income to Opus Dei.

There have been rumours of extreme right-wing sympathies but this is largely nonsense. Because of the Spanish history of the organization, it is strong in Latin America and, of course, in Spain itself. Some members have supported juntas in Latin America, but they have also faced deportation, torture and murder because of their support for social justice. Opus Dei obviously stands for Church authority and hierarchy and so has sometimes been in conflict with the Liberation Theology of certain Marxist Latin American priests. But then so did Pope John Paul the Great and now Pope Benedict, men who have shown quite extraordinary sympathy toward the victims of fascism and offered contrition for any Church failings in this regard.

No albino killers, no former sex-trade workers and not even any leaders of the Bloc Québécois. Which rather disqualifies Opus Dei from what many see as the Canadian body politic -- one which is clad in fetish leather. It’s not the work of God that’s odd, but political liars who start false fires.

Michael Coren is an author and broadcaster.

Opus Dei welcomes left-wingers, too

Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register, Friday, 12 September 2008. Michael Swan is Associate Editor of The Catholic Register. He is an award-winning writer and photographer and holds a Master of Arts degree from New York University.

It probably comes as no surprise to many Catholics that Nicole Charbonneau Barron, is running in the Montreal riding of St. Bruno-St. Hubert for the Conservatives. Charbonneau Barron is a member of Opus Dei, and the personnel prelature to the pope is generally associated with conservative, right wing politics.

Members of Opus Dei were highly placed in the governments of Generalissimo Franco in Spain and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. Opus Dei members were influential in the senior civil service when the generals were running Brazil and Argentina.

But Isabelle Saint-Maurice who runs the Opus Dei information office in Montreal protests that there's nothing right wing about the Catholic movement, whose sole aim is to help people live their faith in their daily lives. Even in Franco's Spain there were Opus Dei members who had to go into exile because of their opposition to Franco and who returned to Spain after the Generalissimo's death to found a centre-left coalition which included ex-communists, she said.

The most prominent, active left-wing politician who is a supernumary of Opus Dei is Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Transport in Gordon Brown's Labour government in England.

Jesus Estanislao was secretary of economic planning in the government of Corazon Aquino which overthrew the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

Italian politician Paola Binetti is a numerary member of Opus Dei and was elected to the Italian senate in 2006 as a member of La Margherita (The Daisy) – a coalition which includes ex-Communists, Greens, Socialists and Christian Democrats.

Of course the list of Opus Dei politicians includes far more senior members of right wing governments and dictatorships than social democrats. But Saint-Maurice claims the only influence Opus Dei has on their members politics is to help them integrate the social teaching of the church and the values of the Gospel. Opus Dei wouldn't tell its politician members how to practice politics any more than they would tell its doctor members how to practice medicine.

"Politics is a practical way of bringing solutions to people," she observed.

Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register, Friday, 12 September 2008