Saint Josemaría Escrivá

He was born in Barbastro, in Spain, on January 9, 1902, the second of six children of José Escrivá and María Dolores Albás, and was baptized on January 13. ¹ The Holy See's biography describes a cheerful, lively child with a great affection for his mother and a trusting friendship with his father. ¹

Sorrow came early. Between 1910 and 1913 his three younger sisters died, which Notre Dame's account puts as dying in infancy, and in 1914 the family business failed. ¹⁵ In 1915 the family moved to Logroño, where his father found work to support them. ¹

In the winter of 1917-18, after a heavy Christmas snowfall in Logroño, he saw footprints frozen in the snow: a discalced Carmelite's, the Holy See says, or a monk's, in Notre Dame's telling. ¹⁵ He found himself asking whether, if others sacrificed so much for God, he could not do something too. ¹ He did not yet know what God wanted of him, but he decided to become a priest. ¹

He began his studies at the seminary of Logroño and in 1920 moved to the seminary of Saragossa, and at his father's suggestion also studied law at the University of Saragossa. ¹ He prayed long hours before the Blessed Sacrament and went every day to the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, repeating, as he recalled later, "Domine, ut sit!" and "Domine, ut videam!": Lord, that it may be; Lord, that I may see. ¹ His father died suddenly on November 27, 1924. ¹ He was ordained a priest on March 28, 1925, by Bishop Díaz Gómara, and on March 31 went to the country village of Perdiguera as assistant to the parish. ¹

In April 1927 he moved to Madrid to work for a doctorate in civil law. ¹⁵ His mother, sister and younger brother came with him, and he supported them by teaching law to students. ¹⁵ At the same time he spent many hours with children and with the sick and the poor in the city's outer suburbs, and, Notre Dame adds, with manual laborers. ¹⁵

Opus Dei, the Holy See says, "was born on 2 October 1928." ¹ He was on retreat, going over notes he had kept of what he had felt God asking of him over the previous years, when he saw, his own word for the experience, the mission he was to carry out: to open a new path in the Church for seeking holiness and doing apostolate through the sanctification of ordinary work, in the middle of the world, without changing one's place in it. ¹ On February 14, 1930, he understood that the work was to include women as well. ¹ Opus Dei says the papal Apostolic Constitution Ut Sit affirms that he saw it "by divine inspiration." ⁶

On August 7, 1931, at Mass, John Paul II said, the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John came to him: "when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all to myself," and he understood more clearly that the baptized were to raise the Cross of Christ above every human reality. ² In 1933 he opened a university center, the DYA Academy, and in 1934 published Spiritual Considerations, the first version of The Way. ¹ The Holy See counts 372 printings of The Way in 44 languages and more than four and a half million copies; Opus Dei says nearly four million in 43 languages. ¹⁶

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936, with violent outbreaks against religion in Madrid. ¹ Notre Dame says many priests were killed and that he escaped into a safe region of Spain. ⁵ After the war, in 1939, he returned to Madrid, finished his law degree and gave retreats to priests, religious and lay people across the country. ¹⁵ His mother died in 1941 while he was preaching a retreat in Lérida. ¹

In those years, the Holy See says, God "let him become the butt of harsh misunderstandings." ¹ The Bishop of Madrid, Eijo y Garay, backed him fully and gave Opus Dei its first canonical approval, and he told his followers not to answer back but to pray, work and smile. ¹ In 1943 the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross came into being within Opus Dei, and on June 25, 1944, three engineers were ordained priests, among them Álvaro del Portillo, who would succeed him. ¹⁶

In 1946 he moved to Rome to seek papal recognition. ¹⁵ Pius XII granted Opus Dei the decree of praise on February 24, 1947, and definitive approval on June 16, 1950; from then on it could admit as Cooperators people who were not Catholic, or not Christian at all. ¹⁶ In 1982, after his death, the Church gave Opus Dei its present status as a personal prelature. ¹

For more than ten years he suffered from a serious form of diabetes, from which, the Holy See says, he was miraculously cured in 1954. ¹ He followed the Second Vatican Council closely, and Opus Dei says John Paul II called him a precursor of the Council. ¹⁶ In his last years he made long catechetical journeys through Europe and Latin America, speaking to crowds, often in the thousands, in the tone of a family gathering. ¹ On March 28, 1975, he celebrated fifty years as a priest. ¹

He died at midday on June 26, 1975, in his workroom in Rome, of a cardiac arrest, before a picture of Our Lady. ¹⁶ Opus Dei then had, by the Holy See's count, over 60,000 members from 80 nationalities; Notre Dame now gives more than 80,000 in more than 60 countries, and Opus Dei itself around 90,000. ¹⁵⁶

John Paul II beatified him in Rome on May 17, 1992. ¹ The miracle for his canonization, Notre Dame says, was the healing of a surgeon's hands from a disease that would have ended his career. ⁵ He was canonized in St. Peter's Square on October 6, 2002, before a crowd Opus Dei puts at 350,000. ²⁶

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Josemaría Escrivá, so none is given here. ¹⁴⁵ John Paul II noted that the pilgrims at his canonization included "intellectuals and blue collar workers," but that describes the crowd, and the page does not turn it into a patronage. ³

His feast is June 26, the anniversary of his death. ¹⁴ Vatican News lists him under that day as "St. Josemaria Escrivá de Balaguer, priest, Founder of the Opus Dei." ⁴ In 2004 Opus Dei announced that bishops in cities across the United States would celebrate Mass on June 26 "to commemorate the feast." ⁷ In 2009 the Congregation for Divine Worship granted the dioceses of Austria, at Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's request, his celebration as an optional memorial on June 26 in their own calendar. ⁸

John Paul II quoted him at the canonization: "We find the invisible God in the most visible and material things." ² The ordinary life of a Christian, he used to say, whether working or resting, praying or sleeping, "is a life in which God is always present." ²

He put prayer first. "In the first place prayer; then expiation; in the third place, but very much in third place, action," he wrote in The Way, and John Paul II quoted the line as the secret of the saints. ² The work he founded was busy all over the world, and that was the order in which he asked his followers to do it.

His own life was not easy to live, and the sources do not say it was. Three sisters died in his childhood, the family was ruined, his father died suddenly, and a war forced him to flee. ¹⁵ The Holy See speaks of harsh misunderstandings, and the canonization homily of the Cross: "Lux in Cruce, requies in Cruce, gaudium in Cruce!", light, peace and joy in the Cross. ¹²

At his golden jubilee as a priest, three months before he died, he said he was "still like a faltering child," and that it would be so to the end of his days: "always beginning anew." ¹