An editorial of the Manila Times, the oldest existing newspaper in the Philippines, founded in 1898.
The vast majority of Filipinos are Christians. But most of them are, like most of the Christians India’s revered “Father of the Nation” Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had met, “so unlike Christ.”
Mahatma Gandhi read the Bible attentively. He was particularly impressed with the Sermon on the Mount and often recommended it to his audiences. Asked by a Christian missionary why he often quoted the words of Jesus Christ and yet had not become a Christian, Mahatma Gandhi replied: “Oh, I don’t reject Christ. I love Christ. It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ.” He added, “If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.”
Josemaria Escriva, ‘the saint of the ordinary’
Today, is the feast day of Saint Josemaria Escriva, “the saint of the ordinary.” His teachings makes it possible for a Christian to be more like Jesus Christ in the ordinary circumstances of his (or her) life.
This “ordinariness” should make Saint Josemaria’s teachings perfectly apt for us today’s Christian Filipinos.
We are being systematically de-Christianized under the influence of the dominant permissive, morally neutral culture. That culture has allowed personal, professional and official corruption to dominate our society. It has made the Christian Filipinos’ practice of their religion schizophrenic—dramatic outward religiosity that mimics but does not have the soul of the Spanish passion and corruption in the lax and unprincipled management of family, government, professional, business, and political duties and responsibilities. It is, in the words of the late John Paul II, the “culture of death.”
Saint Josemaria Escriva crystallized his teaching in the institution he set up, following God’s instructions, 71 years ago, the Prelature of Opus Dei (Work of God). Saint Josemaria, from the very first time he referred to Opus Dei, always said it was the Lord who had founded it. In an instruction in 1934 to the early Opus Dei members, Josemaria wrote: “Opus Dei is not a human invention . . . Years ago God inspired it in a clumsy and deaf instrument [he was referring to himself], who saw it for the first time on the feast of the Guardian Angels, 2 October 1928.”
The future canonized saint wrote about that October day, that while saying Holy Mass, “the mangy donkey” (that’s what he often called himself in relation to God whom he always wished to serve unquestioningly) “came to see the beautiful yet heavy burden that God, in his unfathomable goodness, had laid on his [the mangy donkey’s back]. On that day the Lord founded his Work: from then on I began to have contact with souls of laymen, students and others, but all of them young people. I also began to bring groups together. I began to pray and get others to pray. And I began to suffer . . .”
What God founded, using Saint Josemaria Escriva, became a pastoral phenomenon in the Church. But it has always been imbedded in the Church, not anything outside of it.
It was found to be outstanding by popes and thousands of bishops because the mission of Saint Josemaria, his and Opus Dei’s mission, is precisely what will change the Filipino and other Christians if they take it to heart.
What Josemaria Escriva received during that Mass on October 2, 1928 was not merely God’s general instruction to tell the world that people were all children of God and therefore were dutybound to love God and other human beings. It was not to sound forth “a general call to holiness” that the Lord was asking his priest Josemaria to do.
The marching orders, if we may use that term so often used in our country, he received was to remind baptized Christians (like most of us Filipinos) that they had to exercise the holiness (the Godliness) they received at their baptism not in the cloister, not only when they were threatened with martyrdom, but in the middle of the world and in the ordinary circumstances of their lives.
Saint Josemaria’s mission therefore, which is the mission of the Prelature of Opus Dei, is to call people to be other Christs because that is what they should be for being baptized Christians.
The mission is also to call each man and woman and child personally, individually, one by one—not as the general public of, say, the attendance at a Sunday Mass. This means reminding the individual Christian of God’s words in scriptures: “I have called you by your name” and “God knows every hair on your head.”
And, finally, that the call is to be holy in ordinary life, at home—in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, in the place of work, in the jeep, bus or car, during vacations as well as in the thick of doing hard and sometimes unrewarding labor.
A saint to heal our country
Many pastoral letters of individual bishops and of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) have been calling on us Filipinos to strive for personal holiness if we want to rescue our country from its grave problems of poverty, social injustice, abusive people in power and excessive graft and corruption.
The teachings of Saint Josemaria Escriva give concrete ways for us Filipinos—people of this age—to carry out what the CBCP and the popes have been urging Christians to do.
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