José Manuel Casas Torres, eldest member of Opus Dei, deceased

A translation and posting by Encarnita Ortega Pardo in Opus Dei Today.

Professor José Manuel Casas Torres, 93, creator of modern Spanish geography and a professor at the Universidad de Zaragoza and Universidad Complutense in Madrid, passed away on May 30, in Madrid. He was also a professor at the Universidad de Navarra. In his lectures he promoted the “region” as a space linking the State and the province, and had a key role in modernising Spanish cartography.
Casas Torres was born in Valencia on October 26, 1916. He dedicated most of his life to teaching and research, and many of his students consider him one of the masters of Spanish geography.

He was a Director at the Institute for Applied Geography [Instituto de Geografía Aplicada] of the Superior Council for Scientific Research [Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas] and also the Geography Departament at the Universidad Complutense, where he worked from 1965 to 1983. He combined his retirement with research and a generous availability to his students. He was a member of Opus Dei since 1939, and the eldest living member of the Work at the time of his death.
He met St Josemaría Escrivá in July 1939 and became a member of Opus Dei on July 14, 1939. St Josemaría’s teachings about the universal call to sanctity, the consideration of work as a means of service to society and of helping people reached him, and he felt the call to this endeavour in Opus Dei.

At the Universidad de Zaragoza he created the studies in Geography, and was the founder of the Geographica review, at the same time heading the Department of Applied Geography and being the Vice-Director of the Institute for Pirenaic Studies [Instituto de Estudios Pirenáicos].

He specialised in applied Geography, and in local, urban and population Geography, and occupied the first tenured position in that speciality. Manuel Ferrer Regales, who was one of his students at the Universidad de Navarra, stressed “the generosity of his teaching and research, and his concern for the anthropological and doctrinal content of his topics, which led him to concentrate his studies in population and demographics”.