Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Catholic Register
June 26, 2025
June 26 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death and birth into eternal life of Saint Josemaria Escriva (1902-75), the founder of Opus Dei.
St. John Paul II called him “the saint of ordinary life,” but we could also aptly label him the apostle of the laity and the herald of the universal call to holiness.
St. Josemaria brought a revolution to the Church that we can never take for granted.
Sixty years after the completion of the Second Vatican Council, its most important teaching on the “universal call to holiness” is now so widely known and preached that many presume that this has been clear to Christians from the beginning. After all, the summons to sanctity is as ancient as our creation in our thrice-holy God’s image and likeness. God, moreover, explicitly called us to “be holy, as I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev 20:7) and Jesus, holiness incarnate, summoned us to “be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” (Matt 5:48) through loving others as he has loved us first (Jn 15:12).
This clear standard for every Christian life, however, was diluted over the centuries. Many grew to think that to be holy, one needed to live in a “state of perfection” as a cloistered nun, monk, hermit, priest or religious. These were the privileged few expected to get an A+ on the gift of life. The rest of the baptized were second-class Christians on a pass-fail track, limited to a simplified version of the Gospel and to trying to assist clergy and religious in their ecclesial work. There were of course voices crying out in the wilderness over the centuries summoning the laity to holiness, like St. Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life (holy life), but their messages never really got widespread traction in Church mentality and practice.
Then came St. Josemaria, who as a young Spanish priest in 1928 discovered that God was calling him to help the vast majority of those in the Church — lay people and, later, diocesan priests — seek holiness in the midst of their ordinary life. He named what he believed God was challenging him to do, “Opus Dei,” geared toward helping people convert their daily duties into a “work of God.”
Opus Dei, he once said in an interview, was raised up to “foster the search for holiness and the carrying out of the apostolate by Christians who live in the world, whatever their state in life or position in society. ‘The Work’ was born to help those Christians, who through their family, their friendships, their ordinary work, their aspirations, form part of the very texture of civil society, to understand that their life, just as it is, can be an opportunity for meeting Christ: that it is a way of holiness and apostolate.
“Since God wants the majority of Christians to remain in secular activities and to sanctify the world from within,” he continued, “the purpose of Opus Dei is to help them discover their divine mission, showing them that their human vocation — their professional, family and social vocation — is not opposed to their supernatural vocation. On the contrary, it is an integral part of it.”
Many found St. Josemaria’s message and work controversial, some even heretical. While few in the Church object, and most appreciate, when a lay person is genuinely holy, it is something different for a priest to begin preaching that God is calling lay people to become not just good but saints, not to mention that lay people can become holy right in the middle of the world in the midst of seemingly mundane tasks.
That message was first and foremost considered dangerous and injurious to vocations promotion to the priesthood and religious life: if young people sensing a call to Christian greatness recognized that they could with God’s grace achieve it without heading to the seminary or convent, many would, and in fact, did.
Then it was deemed harmful by many to “pressure” people to live up to a standard of life that few could obtain, conscious that, recognizing that most have no chance at greatness, they might just give up the good fight, quit the race and abandon the faith.
Despite opposition and misunderstanding, the perils and privations of the Spanish Civil War, as well as the hardships and crosses incumbent on pretty much any founder of an ecclesiastical work, St. Josemaria faithfully soldiered on, seeking holiness in the midst of his ordinary duties as he sought to be an instrument for the sanctification of others and of the Church.
St. John Paul II said about St. Josemaria they day after he canonized him in 2002: “St Josemaría was chosen by the Lord to announce the universal call to holiness and to point out that daily life and ordinary activities are a path to holiness. One could say that he was the saint of ordinary life. In fact, he was convinced that for those who live with a perspective of faith, everything is an opportunity to meet God, everything can be an incentive for prayer. Seen in this light, daily life reveals an unexpected greatness. Holiness is truly within everyone’s reach.”
St. John Paul II spent his pontificate trying to put into practice the message God had entrusted to St. Josemaria and that the Second Vatican Council trumpeted. He canonized 482 men and women from all walks of life and beatified another 1,338. And in his pastoral plan for the third Christian millennium, Novo Millennio Ineunte, released the year before St. Josemaria’s canonization, he doubled-down on the expectations that flow from baptism and how everything the Church does is meant to lead to the fulfillment of one’s baptismal graces and promises.
“Since Baptism,” John Paul II wrote, “is a true entry into the holiness of God through incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of his Spirit, it would be a contradiction to settle for a life of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity. To ask catechumens: ‘Do you wish to receive Baptism?’ means at the same time to ask them: ‘Do you wish to become holy?’ It means to set before them the radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt 5:48).”
He continued, “This ideal of perfection must not be misunderstood as if it involved some kind of extraordinary existence, possible only for a few ‘uncommon heroes’ of holiness. … The time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living: the whole life of the Christian community … must lead in this direction. It is also clear however that the paths to holiness are personal and call for a genuine ‘training in holiness,’ adapted to people’s needs. This training must integrate the resources offered to everyone with both the traditional forms of individual and group assistance, as well as the more recent forms of support offered in associations and movements recognized by the Church.”
Opus Dei is one of those forms of assistance and support, now with 94,000 members, comprised of 60 percent women and 74 percent married, and just over 2,100 secular priests. It specializes in “training in holiness” for those in the middle of the world, making call to holiness practical through what St. Josemaria called a “plan of life,” a series of daily practices to keep the presence of God throughout one’s day. It trains members how to sanctify the ordinary work that constitutes the vast majority of their life — whether intellectual or physical labors, in the office or at home — by learning how to make, as St. Josemaria once quipped, “heroic verse out of the prose of each day.”
At a practical level that means learning how to offer one’s work like the pleasing sacrifice of Abel, to do it out of love to God and for those who will be benefit from it. Through such labor one is able at the same time to grow in holiness through the virtues acquired in work well done as well as to serve as instruments of sanctification — salt, light and leaven — for those with whom one works, through friendship and good example.
I encountered Opus Dei for the first time as a freshman in college. St. Josemaria’s now famous insight, “These world crises are crises of saints,” captured me and helped me convert my human ambitions into holy ones. Once I grasped that my fundamental vocation in life was to become a saint, it became easier for me to discern definitively and follow my vocation not just to be a priest, but to strive to be a holy priest. I began to live by a plan of life and eventually would write a book about it.
While it is somewhat straightforward for a priest to sanctify his preaching and the celebration of the sacraments, the spirituality of the sanctification of ordinary work taught by Opus Dei has really helped me to integrate all of the other tasks of the ordinary work of a diocesan priest — mounds of paperwork, fixing broken toilets, supervising staff, dealing patiently with occasionally demanding parishioners — into a unity of life in pursuit of holiness.
St. Josemaria taught me that whatever crises or problems I was facing, big or small, the most important remedy was and is, God and that our fundamental task is, like the saints, to cooperate with him.
The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the culmination of St. Josemaria’s own lifelong pursuit of holiness is an opportunity for everyone in the Church to thank God for the graces given to him. These have helped the Church through the Second Vatican Council understand so much better the point of the Christian life as well as the mission of the Church as a vocational technical school training people for holiness and heaven.