St. Josemaría Escrivá

1. Who Josemaría Escrivá Was

Escrivá was a diocesan priest of no great institutional standing for most of his working life. He was ordained at Zaragoza in 1925, served briefly in a rural parish, moved to Madrid to study law, supported himself and his widowed mother by tutoring, and served as chaplain to a foundation that ran a home for the sick and the dying. The famous shorthand about him, that he taught a spirituality for people with jobs, comes out of those years, when his own life consisted of jobs.

He spent the second half of his life in Rome, from 1946 until his death, directing an organisation that grew from a handful of students to a body present on several continents. He wrote steadily, preached constantly, and left a body of teaching that is short, practical and repetitive by design.

2. Barbastro, Logroño and the Footprints in the Snow

Josemaría was born on 9 January 1902 at Barbastro, a small town in the province of Huesca, the second of six children of José Escrivá, a textile merchant, and Dolores Albás. Three of his younger sisters died in childhood, one after another. In 1914 the family business failed, and his father moved the household to Logroño to take a poorly paid post in a shop. The family went from comfort to genteel poverty in a few years.

The turning point he described all his life came in the winter of 1917 or 1918 at Logroño. He saw footprints in the snow left by a discalced Carmelite who had walked barefoot through the town, and it struck him that if a man could do that much for God, he could do something too. He began to pray that God would show him what it was, using a formula he kept repeating for years, that the Lord should let him see. He entered the seminary at Logroño and then at Zaragoza, and was ordained on 28 March 1925.

His father died in 1924, leaving him responsible for his mother, his sister Carmen and his brother Santiago. That family stayed with him for decades and worked alongside him, and the ordinary domestic burden he carried is part of why his preaching about sanctifying household duties does not sound theoretical.

3. 2 October 1928 and the Founding of Opus Dei

On 2 October 1928, while making a retreat in Madrid, Escrivá said that he saw what God had been asking him to see: an association of ordinary Christians who would seek holiness in the middle of the world, without changing their state in life, their profession or their address. Opus Dei, the Work of God, is dated from that day. He extended it to women on 14 February 1930, and in 1943 he founded the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, which allowed priests to be incardinated for the work.

The first years were spent among students, workers and the sick in Madrid. Then the Spanish Civil War closed over everything. Priests were being killed in Republican-held Madrid, and Escrivá spent months in hiding, including a period sheltering in the Honduran legation. In late 1937 he crossed the Pyrenees on foot into Andorra with a small group of followers and made his way to the other zone, and he resumed his work at Burgos.

The Spanish setting of those years has drawn its own controversy, taken up below. What is clear from the record is that the founding idea preceded the war by a decade and was formed among students and hospital patients rather than in politics.

Opus Dei received diocesan approval in Madrid in 1941, and approval from Rome as a secular institute of pontifical right in 1947, with the definitive approval following in 1950. Escrivá moved to Rome in 1946 and lived there for the rest of his life.

4. The Universal Call to Holiness

Before the Second Vatican Council, a great many Catholics assumed in practice that serious holiness belonged to priests and religious, and that lay people were expected to keep the commandments and support the clergy. Escrivá preached from 1928 onward that this was a misreading of the Gospel, and that every baptised person is called to the same holiness by a different road.

The Church made the same teaching explicit at the Council. Lumen Gentium devotes its fifth chapter to the universal call to holiness, stating that all the faithful of whatever rank are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity. The Catechism repeats it: all Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2013).

Scripture is where he took it from. The command in the Sermon on the Mount is addressed to a crowd: be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Paul writes to an ordinary congregation of tradesmen and slaves that this is the will of God, your sanctification (1 Thessalonians 4:3). Escrivá's contribution was to insist that the road runs through the reader's actual timetable.

5. Sanctifying Work

His characteristic phrase was that God is found among the pots and pans, which he took from Teresa of Ávila, and his characteristic image was that the workbench, the desk and the kitchen table are an altar. An honest lawyer, a patient mother and a careful mechanic have the same access to sanctity as a monk, on condition that the work is done well and offered.

Three conditions kept his teaching from becoming a slogan.

The work has to be done properly

Sanctified work in his sense is competent work. Sloppy work offered to God is still sloppy work, and he said so repeatedly. Professional excellence was, for him, the raw material of the offering.

The work has to be honest

Work that is unjust in itself cannot be sanctified by intention. That limit is worth stating plainly, because the doctrine is otherwise easy to abuse as a blessing on whatever a person happens to be doing for money.

The work has to be prayed

He asked for a plan of life: daily mental prayer, Mass and the sacraments, the Rosary, examination of conscience at night, regular confession and spiritual direction. The teaching about work rests on that structure. Without it, the claim that ordinary life sanctifies collapses into the claim that nothing needs to change.

The Scriptural roots are direct. Adam is placed in the garden to work it and keep it before anything goes wrong (Genesis 2:15). Christ says that his Father is at work and so is he (John 5:17). Paul tells the Colossians that whatever they do, in word or deed, they should do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, and that whatever they do they should work at it heartily, as for the Lord (Colossians 3:17 and 3:23). Christ himself spent most of his life in a workshop, which is the argument Escrivá returned to most often.

6. Divine Filiation

Underneath the teaching about work sits the conviction Escrivá called divine filiation, the recognition that a baptised person is genuinely a child of God rather than a servant on probation. He described it as the foundation of everything else he taught, and said that a Christian who grasps it acquires a settled confidence that does not depend on his own performance.

Paul states it in the terms Escrivá used: you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but the Spirit of adoption, by which we cry out, Abba, Father, and if children, then heirs (Romans 8:15 to 17). John puts it as astonishment: see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are (1 John 3:1).

The practical consequence he drew from it is worth keeping, because it cuts against a certain kind of religious anxiety. A child of God works hard and fails often and returns without drama, and the returning is the ordinary condition of the Christian life rather than an emergency. Escrivá's counsel to people who had collapsed in their resolutions was to begin again, that day, without ceremony.

7. The Writings

Escrivá wrote for use rather than for the library. His best-known book, The Way, is a collection of 999 numbered points, some a sentence long, developed from a shorter collection he published in 1934 and issued in its familiar form in 1939. It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold in very large numbers.

Three later collections follow the same pattern: Furrow and The Forge, both published after his death, and Holy Rosary, a short meditation on the mysteries written early. His preaching was gathered in two volumes of homilies, Christ Is Passing By and Friends of God, and those give the fullest statement of his teaching in continuous prose.

The style divides readers. The points in The Way are blunt, affectionate and hortatory, written to be read one at a time in a few seconds and then acted on. Readers who want an argument find them thin. Readers who want a daily prod find them useful. Both reactions are reasonable, and the books were built for the second.

8. Opus Dei After Him

Escrivá died in Rome on 26 June 1975. His successor as head of Opus Dei was Álvaro del Portillo, who had worked with him for decades and who was beatified in 2014.

In 1982 John Paul II erected Opus Dei as a personal prelature, the first and for a long time the only body of that kind. A personal prelature is a jurisdiction defined by persons rather than by territory, headed by a prelate, with priests incardinated in it and lay members who remain under their own diocesan bishops for ordinary parish purposes.

Membership takes several forms. Numeraries commit to celibacy and usually live in centres of the prelature. Associates commit to celibacy and live with their own families or independently. Supernumeraries, who are the large majority, are typically married people living entirely ordinary lives. Cooperators support the work without being members and need not be Catholic.

In 2022 Pope Francis issued the motu proprio Ad charisma tuendum, which adjusted the prelature's governance: it placed Opus Dei under the Dicastery for the Clergy, required a regular report to the Holy See, and provided that the prelate would no longer be made a bishop. Further revision of the prelature's statutes has followed. The stated purpose was to underline the charismatic rather than hierarchical character of the body.

9. Criticism and Controversy

Escrivá and the organisation he founded have attracted sustained criticism, and a page that hides it is not worth reading. Setting it out plainly is also the best answer to the wilder claims that circulate.

The speed of the canonisation

He was beatified in 1992 and canonised in 2002, twenty-seven years after his death, which is fast by historical standards. Critics argued that the cause moved too quickly, that the procedural reforms of 1983 had reduced the adversarial scrutiny that older causes received, and that Opus Dei's resources and standing in Rome told in its favour. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints stated that the process had followed the rules.

Testimony from former members

Some who had known him gave critical evidence, including the priest Vladimir Feltzman and María del Carmen Tapia, a former member who had worked closely with him in Rome and who published a memoir describing an authoritarian style and a fierce temper. Opus Dei has disputed those accounts and has published testimony to the contrary. A reader weighing the man should know that former members are among the witnesses on both sides.

The noble title

In 1968 Escrivá petitioned for and obtained the restoration of a dormant family title, the marquisate of Peralta, which he later transferred to his brother. Critics have read that as inconsistent with what he preached about humility. His defenders describe it as a family matter of patrimony that he settled and passed on. The facts are not in dispute, and the interpretation is.

Politics and Spain

Several members of Opus Dei held senior economic posts in the Spanish government under Franco in the 1950s and 1960s, and critics have treated that as evidence of a political programme. Opus Dei's position has been that members act on their own responsibility in temporal matters and that members also opposed the regime. The association was real, and the claim that it was directed by the founder as policy has not been established.

Practices and recruitment

Traditional penances used by some celibate members, including the cilice and the discipline, have drawn attention and are often described inaccurately in popular fiction. They belong to a long ascetic tradition in the Church and are not required of the married majority. More seriously, former members in several countries have made public complaints about recruitment of young people and about the working conditions and status of the women who staff the prelature's centres, and cases have been raised with civil authorities and with the Holy See. Those complaints concern the institution in the decades since his death rather than findings against Escrivá himself, and this page does not report any outcome that has not been published.

Two things stay off the table here. The Church's judgment in canonising him is that he lived the Christian virtues to a heroic degree, and that judgment is what the Church teaches. It is compatible with holding that particular decisions of his are open to criticism, which is true of every saint who left a paper trail.

10. Canonisation, Feast Day and Devotion

Feast day

His memorial is 26 June, the day of his death in 1975. It is kept as an optional memorial in the general calendar of the Church.

Canonisation

He was beatified by John Paul II on 17 May 1992 and canonised by the same pope on 6 October 2002 in Saint Peter's Square, in the presence of a very large crowd.

Burial and devotion

His remains rest in the prelatic church of Our Lady of Peace in Rome, at the headquarters of Opus Dei. He has no formally decreed universal patronage, and he is commonly invoked by people who want to sanctify their professional work and by those seeking employment. Prayer cards asking his intercession are distributed widely.

For the Church's account of how a person is recognised as a saint, and what a canonisation does and does not claim, see our page on the saints.

11. What to Take From St. Josemaría

• Stop waiting for a different life. The job you have, the family you have and the street you live on are the material. There is no second, holier life being kept from you.
• Do the work well. Offering shoddy work to God is not an offering. Competence is the first form this spirituality takes.
• Keep a plan of life, and keep it small. A few minutes of mental prayer, Mass when you can, the Rosary, a short examination of conscience at night, confession at a regular interval. All of that is free at any parish.
• Begin again without drama. Divine filiation means the failure is not the end of the relationship. Start again the same day.
• Start today. Escrivá spent eleven years asking to be shown what he was for, and then acted the moment he saw it. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and a plan of life that begins next January begins nowhere.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Josemaría Escrivá?

Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer was a Spanish Catholic priest, born at Barbastro in 1902 and ordained at Zaragoza in 1925. On 2 October 1928 he founded Opus Dei, an organisation of lay people and priests devoted to seeking holiness in ordinary work and family life. He lived in Rome from 1946 until his death on 26 June 1975, and he was canonised by John Paul II on 6 October 2002.

What is Opus Dei?

Opus Dei is a personal prelature of the Catholic Church, erected as such by John Paul II in 1982. A personal prelature is a jurisdiction defined by persons rather than by territory. Its members are mostly lay people who live at home and work in ordinary jobs, together with a smaller number of celibate members and priests. Members remain subject to their own diocesan bishops in ordinary parish matters, and the prelature provides them with spiritual formation.

What did St. Josemaría Escrivá actually teach?

He taught that every baptised person is called to holiness without changing state in life, that ordinary work done well and offered to God is a means of sanctification, and that the foundation of the Christian life is the recognition that a baptised person is truly a child of God. The Church stated the first of these at the Second Vatican Council and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2013. His practical demand was a daily plan of life: mental prayer, Mass and the sacraments, the Rosary, examination of conscience and regular confession.

Why is Opus Dei controversial?

The main criticisms are the speed of Escrivá's canonisation, testimony from some former members describing an authoritarian internal culture, the prominence of some members in the Spanish government under Franco, methods of recruiting young people, and the treatment of the women who staff the prelature's centres. Opus Dei disputes many of these accounts and has published its own material in response. Popular fiction has also spread inaccurate claims about the organisation, including about penitential practices that belong to a long ascetic tradition in the Church and are not asked of most members.

What is The Way, and is it worth reading?

The Way is a collection of 999 short numbered points, developed from a shorter collection Escrivá published in 1934 and issued in its familiar form in 1939. It was written to be read a point at a time and acted on rather than read through. Readers who want sustained argument usually prefer his volumes of homilies, Christ Is Passing By and Friends of God.

When is the feast of St. Josemaría Escrivá?

His memorial is 26 June, the date of his death in Rome in 1975. He was beatified on 17 May 1992 and canonised on 6 October 2002, both by John Paul II. His remains rest in the church of Our Lady of Peace in Rome, and he is commonly invoked by people who want to sanctify their professional work.