Josemaria's Way

By Robert Moynihan, an excerpt from Catholic Culture

In one of the most important gestures of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II on October 6 canonized St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei. With that gesture, he placed the full weight of his papal authority behind Escriva's "Work"

"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."

— Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, remarks on the canonization of St. Josemaria Escriva, from the L'Osservatore Romano, Special Issue, October 6, 2002

"Heroism, sanctity, daring, require a constant spiritual preparation. You can only give to others what you already have. And in order to give God to them, you yourself need to get to know him, to live his life, to serve him." — St. Josemaria Escriva, The Forge, no. 78

The 20th century ended, for the Catholic Church, on October 6, 2002. It ended precisely 40 years after the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.

It ended on a warm, blue autumn day in Rome with John Paul II's canonization of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, as a saint.

In so doing, the Pope presented sanctity as the vocation of every baptized person, and so reiterated the central message of the Second Vatican Council. (This year marks the centenary of the birth of Josemaria Escriva, on January 9, 1902, in Barbastro, northern Spain. He died in Rome on June 26, 1975.)

The 20th century was the century that brought the medieval world to a definitive end.

That old world was "Christendom" (admittedly in considerable disarray from the French Revolution onward), dominated politically by at least nominally Christian kings and kaisers and aristocratic elites, dominated militarily and economically by Western Europeans, who colonized the world.

The First World War saw those elites slaughtered in the trenches of France, ushering in the Communist, Fascist and Nazi periods.

The Second World War saw the final destruction of the old European order, as Western European cities were bombed, the continent's Christian tradition was rejected and ridiculed, and its Jewish population murdered or expelled. Out of that war came the United Nations, the creation of the state of Israel, the general de-colonialization of the world, and, after a decade or so, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

The essential historical purpose and effect of that Council — as it now seems from a vantage point of 40 years — was to prepare the Church for a new world order : the order which is now nearly upon us.

No longer would the world be Europe-centered; the age of "globalization" could already be sensed in the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles (the Cuban missile crisis occurred in the month the Council opened, in October 1962) and international communications.

No longer would the Church be primarily organized in small, separated communities (parishes, dioceses) of people who lived most of their lives in one place, in one cultural context; the Church would increasingly be organized as one world-wide community, a less canonically and jurisdictionally structured social body than a world-wide order, or organism — like the new Church movements . . . or like a personal prelature (the group founded by Escriva, Opus Dei, is for the moment the only personal prelature in the Catholic Church).

The 20th century was marked by vast and pitiless persecutions of the Church. The Communists and the Nazis made clear to the Church that state power in the emerging "modern" world could seek out, crush and physically eliminate unwanted religious groups. (There were more Christian martyrs in the 20th century than in all previous centuries.)

But, if the post-World War II "new world order" were also to be un-Christian, perhaps in a veiled way but with even more sinister and effective means of control and persecution, because more advanced and comprehensive, what chance would the Church have to survive and prosper?

Having experienced the 20th century, the solution seemed evident: the Church needed to "go to ground" — to de-clericalize, de-hierarchicalize, and to have its members intermingle in all aspects of ordinary human life, indistinguishable in any outward way from other members of society, except in the excellence of their work, engaged in as a vocation . . . a vocation to sanctity in the midst of the world. And so, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church made the extraordinary leap, the epochal transformation, from a Church organized along lines that had worked well enough in the medieval age, hierarchical and clerical, to a Church organized to survive and flourish and live out the faith in a "new age," an age of a looming "new world order."

And this was the deep meaning of Pope John Paul II's words when he said, after canonizing Escriva, that the message of the Opus Dei founder is to stand up to "a materialist culture that threatens to dissolve the most genuine identity of the disciples of Christ."

The Holy Father pronounced the formula of canonization for the Spanish priest at 10:23 a.m. in St. Peter's Square. And so, in a certain sense, we may say that we know the exact minute that the old century and the old world ended: at 10:23 a.m. in Rome on a sunny October morning in the year 2002.

Some 300,000 pilgrims, many of them members of Opus Dei, who filled St. Peter's Square, applauded at that moment.

Read the rest at Catholic Culture.