May 2: Anniversary of the Prelatic Church - Our Lady of Peace, Rome. The Subjective Nature of the Church and Opus Dei

Together with the Apostolic Constitution Ut Sit, which erected Opus Dei as a personal prelature, the Roman Pontiff also erected the oratory of Our Lady of Peace as the prelatic church. Under its altar lie the sacred remains of our founder. The then-Prelate Alvaro del Portillo officiated at the solemn ceremony of dedication on the 2nd of May 1986.

In September 1931, riding on a trolley in Madrid before the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, St. Josemaria Escriva heard the words “you are my Son, You are Christ.”[1] With this consciousness of the sacramental identity with Christ and the burden of the charism to found Opus Dei as a subjective phenomenon in the Church and in the world, he found himself addressing the spiritual son of his (who was to help him carry the brunt of the burden of founding and giving continuity to Opus Dei), Alvaro del Portillo as “Saxum:” Rock, the first of the living stones that was to build the communio that is Opus Dei. St. Josemaria is buried under the main altar of the prelatic church.

What characterizes the Prelature of Opus Dei are two points: 1) the identity of vocation for the lay faithful and the ministerial priests; 2) secularity.

Opus Dei as Subject:

1) The identity of vocation for laity and ministers – in spite of the essential and irreducible difference in the way they share and exercise the one priesthood of Jesus Christ[2] – consists in the identical gift of self that one and the other is asked to give. Msgr. Fernando Ocariz says: “This more direct meaning of the universal call to holiness could be designated as the `subjective’ dimension, in the sense that all men and women are personally called. Closely linked to it is what we might call the `objective’ dimension of the universality of the Christian vocation – the fact that everything that shapes the life of a person, situating him or her in the Church and in the world…”[3] Ocariz goes on: “The subjective aspect of the universal scope of the call to holiness, even when found in the preaching and writings of many saints and spiritual writers of various times (just to mention a few – St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis de Sales, St. Therese of Lisieux), was usually not stated emphatically: holiness was considered as possible for any Christian, but at the same time it was seen as probably exceptional for the majority, namely those involved in the affairs of the world.”[4]

2) Secularity means (relative) “autonomy” in determining self. Secularity and priesthood are intimately connected. The Priesthood of Jesus Christ is mediation between self and God on behalf of others. To determine self in order to get possession of self so as to be able to make the gift of self is the Christological anthropology of priesthood.

The profound meaning of freedom does not consist primarily in choice but in the power and execution of self-mastery.[5] Hence, the freedom that is the autonomy of self-mastery is also the necessary pre-requisite for sharing in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Hence, the vocabulary of St. Josemaria Escriva of “priestly soul” and “lay mentality” are intimately joined and cannot be given one without the other. The exercise of priesthood creates secularity. The present Prelate of Opus Dei remarked: “Secularity…is not added on to our vocation from outside. On the contrary, it receives it fullest meaning from our vocation….Secularity is something Christian, a Christian way of being and living. In other words, our divine vocation, our spirit – or in broader terms, Christian faith and morality – cannot be judged from the starting-point of a secularity defined a priori. Rather, secularity should be judged and valued – or rather, discovered – from the starting-point of our vocation, and what the Christian faith reveals to us about man, about the world and about our destiny.”[6] Hence, we must create the true secularity that is not secularism. Benedict has recently affirmed the true nature of secularity when he assured the president of Italy's lower house of Parliament, Pier Ferdinando Casini, Casini that the Church "does not intend to claim any privilege for herself, but only the possibility of carrying out her own particular mission, with respect for the legitimate secularity of the state." This legitimate secularity, he noted, "is not in opposition to the Christian message but rather indebted to it, as experts in the history of civilization know well." [7]

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican archivist, also drew a sharp distinction between secularity and secularism in a conference marking the 150th anniversary of the French pontifical seminary. Secularity, the cardinal explained, means that the state does not establish any official religion. But, he continued, `Secularism means that there is no religion but the state – it is nothing short of state atheism.”[8]


The Church is Subject


The Second Vatican Council in its Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium #8 proclaims that “This Church [the Church of Jesus Christ], constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him.” There has been a quarrel between the meaning of the use of the word “est” (is) and the word/phrase “subsistit in” with regard to the truth of the existential and historical Catholic Church with the Pope as head, being the one, true Church of Jesus Christ. The quarrel, of course, has to do with whether there is salvation only by belonging to the Catholic Church, whether there is salvation outside of it? and if there is, what does that mean? And if there is, does that mean that the Catholic Church is not the one true Church of Jesus Christ?

At the moment, the point that is uppermost in the mind of Benedict XVI is the subjectivity and therefore continuity of the Church as a Person, the “Whole Christ.” The Declaration Dominus Iesus (August 2000) affirmed that “The Lord Jesus, the only Saviour, did not only establish a simple community of disciples, but constituted the Church as a salvific mystery: he himself is in the Church and the Church is in him (cf. Jn. 15, 1ff; Gal. 3, 28; Eph. 4, 15-16; Acts 9, 5). Therefore, the fullness of Christ’s salvific mystery belongs also to the Church, inseparably united to her Lord. Indeed, Jesus Christ continues his presence and his work of salvation in the Church and by means of the Church (cf. Col. 1, 24-27), which is his body (cf. 1 Cor. 12, 12-13, 27; Col 1, 18). And thus, just as the head and members of a living body, though not identical, are inseparable, so too Christ and the Church can neither be confused nor separated, and constitute a single `whole Christ.’ This same inseparability is also expressed in the New Testament by the analogy of the Church as the Bride of Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 11, 2; Eph. 5, 25-29; Rev. 21, 2,9).”[9]

Since salvation only comes through Jesus Christ since only He is God and man, salvation can only come through the Church that is one with His very Person, and therefore is His Subjectivity. This identity of the Church with the Subjectivity of Christ Himself as “I Am,” is driven home by Benedict in his presentation in Toronto in 1986: “Conversion according to Paul is something much more radical than a mere revision of a few opinions or attitudes. It is a death event. In other words it is the replacement of the subject - of the `I.’ The `I’ ceases to be independent and to be subject existing in itself. It is torn from itself and inserted into a new subject. The `I’ does not perish, but must let itself diminish completely, in effect, in order to be received within a larger `I’ and, together with that larger `I,’ to be conceived anew.” Later, he says: “It is essential to note that Paul does not say `You are a single mass,’ in some collectivist sense, but `You are one.’ You have become a new subject, unique in Christ, and thus, by means of the fusion of the subject, you are now within the realm of the Promise.” Still later, he does the hermeneutic of 1 Cor. 12, 12: “(Paul) uses the common comparison of the body and its members, which was used in ancient social philosophy. In the transfer of this metaphor to the Church, however, there is a surprising change which is often overlooked. To miss this change inevitably leads to an incorrect grasp of Paul’s entire understanding of the Church. He does not hesitate to use comparisons with the sociology prevalent at his time, but he does so in a way which shows that his conception of the Church is entirely different from his view of society. In fact Paul does not say: `Just as in an organism there are many members interacting with one another, the same thing holds true for the Church.’ He actually abandons the ancient image and says something on a completely different level: `Just as the body and the various members interact, the same is true of Christ.’ (1 Cor. 12, 12). The subject being compared is not the Church as such, or a subject which is separate in itself. Rather, the new subject is `the Christ,’ and the Church is thus nothing more than the space into which this new subject can move. Therefore, the Church for Paul is much more than simple social interaction [underline mine]. At issue here is the same Christological `singular’ which Paul emphasized in the Galatians. Here, too, it has a sacramental significance, but this time it signifies the Eucharist. Paul had already outlined the essence of the Eucharist two chapters earlier when he used the bold phrase, `since there is one bread, for this reason the many are one body’ (1 Cor. 10, 17). We can respect the biblical word for body, soma, by translating it as `subject,’ if by this we mean the corporality and historicity of the subject.”[10]

The Church: Subject Means Identity with Change


The Church has continuity only by reforming itself as a subject. Only subjects – persons – are capable of continuously forming and becoming themselves by a process of self-mastery, self-governance and self-gift whereby they are totally “ecstatic” (ex-stasis) as in “outside” of themselves. This is experienced in spousal love, but we would not know how to thematize such a counter-intuitional experience as prototypical if it were not mediated to us theologically from the revelation of the Trinity.

Scripture Reveals Person to be Constitutively Relational

That theological mediation has been offered to us by Benedict XVI when he stammers,

“the First Person does not beget the Son in the sense of the act of begetting coming on top of the finished Person; it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving, `wave’ not `corpuscle’… In this idea of relativity in word and love, independent of the concept[11] of substance and not to be classified among the `accidents, Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the `individual.’” This assertion is unimaginably important since it introduces thought into a different horizon of being – at the level of consciousness beyond and pre-conceptual - that it would never be able to experience if the self had not been called forth by Revelation in both Old and New Testaments. In this experience of faith and spousal love which are equivalent anthropological and epistemological acts, the self experiences itself beyond the category of substance and the individual.

At a later moment, Benedict said that “One could thus define the first person as self-donation in fruitful knowledge and love; it is to the one who gives himself, in whom the act of self-donation is found, but it is this self-donation, pure reality of act. An idea that appeared again in our century in modern physics is here anticipated: that there is pure act-being. We know that in our century the attempt has been made to reduce matter to a wave, to a pure act of streaming. What may be a questionable idea in the context of physics was asserted by theology in the fourth and fifth century about the persons in God, namely, that they are nothing but the act of relativity toward each other. In God, person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other; it does not lie on the level of substance – the substance is one – but on the level of dialogical reality, of relativity toward the other. In this matter Augustine could attempt, at least in outline, to show the interplay between threeness and unity by saying, for example: in Deo nihil secundum accidens dicitur, sed secundum substantiam aut secundum relationem (in God there is nothing accidental, but only substance and relation). Relation is here recognized as a third specific fundamental category between substance and accident, the two great categorical forms of thought in Antiquity. Again we encounter the Christian newness of the personalistic idea in all its sharpness and clarity. The contribution offered by faith to human thought becomes especially clear and palpable here. It was faith that gave birth to this idea of pure act, of pure relativity, which does not lie on the level of substance and does not touch or divide substance; and it was faith that thereby brought the personal phenomenon into view.

“We stand here at the point in which the speculative penetration of Scripture, the assimilation of faith by humanity’s own thought, seems to have reached its highest point; and yet we can notice with astonishment that the way back into Scripture opens precisely here. For Scripture has clearly brought out precisely this phenomenon of pure relativity as the nature of the person. The clearest case is Johannine theology. In Johannine theology we find, for example, the formula, `The Son cannot do anything of himself’ (5, 19). However, the same Christ who says this says, `I and the Father are one’ (10, 30). This means, precisely because he has nothing of himself alone, because he does not place himself as a delimited substance next to the Father, but exists in total relativity toward him, and constitutes nothing but relativity toward him that does not delimit a precinct of what is merely and properly its own – precisely because of this they are one. This structure is in turn transferred – and here we have the transition to anthropology – to the disciples when Christ says, `Without me you can do nothing’ (15, 5). At the same time he prays `that they may be one as we are one’ (17, 11). It is thus part of the existence even of the disciples that man does not posit the reservation of what is merely and properly his own, does not strive to form the substance of the closed self, but enters into pure relativity toward the other and toward God. It is in this way that he truly comes ot himself and into the fullness of his own, because he enters into unity with the one to whom he is related.

“I believe a profound illumination of God as well as man occurs here, the decisive illumination of what person must means in terms of Scripture: not a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity, which is, of course, realized in its entirety only in the one whop is God, but which indicates the direction of all personal being. The point is thus reached here at which – as we shall see below – there is a transition from the doctrine of God into Christology and into anthropology…

“Boethius’s concept of person, which prevailed in Western philosophy, must be criticized as entirely insufficient. Remaining on the level of the Greek mind, Boethius defined `person’ as naturae rationalis individual substantia, as the individual substance of a rational nature. One sees that the concept of person stands entirely on the level of substance. This cannot clarify anything about the Trinity or about Christology; it is an affirmation that remains on the level of the Greek mind which thinks in substantialist terms.

“By contrast, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, Richard of St. Victor found a concept of the person derived from within Christianity when he defined person as spiritualis naturae incommunicabilis existential, as the incommunicably proper existence of spiritual nature [unmittelbar eigene Existenz] . This definition correctly sees that in its theological meaning `person does not lie on the level of essence, but of existence…. Scholastic theology developed categories of existence out of this contribution given by Christian faith to the human mind. Its defect was that it limited these categories to Christology and to the doctrine of the Trinity and did not make them fruitful in the whole extent of spiritual reality… The contribution of Christian faith to the whole of human thought is not realized; it remains at first detached from its as a theological exception, although it is precisely the meaning of this new element to call into question the whole of human thought and to set it on a new course.”[12]

However, it did not take place in Scholastic theology or philosophy, and this because it treated Jesus Christ as a “theological exception.” From the side of the Trinity, Christ is relational. But He is an exception for man. Benedict continues,

“The second great misunderstanding is to see Christ as the simply unique ontological exception which must be treated as such. This exception is an object of highly interesting ontological speculation, but it must remain separate in its box as an exception to the rule and must not be permitted to mix with the rest of human thought.” Christ, therefore, is to be understood from above, while is to be understood from below, i.e. from the experience of the senses and the abstract substance that “stands in self.”

Benedict concludes that, in reality, Christ, historically, has been the dynamic in grasping the meaning of the human person and has propelled history in that direction.

“If it is true, however, that Christ is not the ontological exception, if from his exceptional position he is, on the contrary, the fulfillment of the entire human being, then the Christological concept of person is an indication for theology of how person is to be understood as such. In fact, this concept of person, or simply the dimension that has become visible here, has always acted as a spark in intellectual history and it has propelled development, even when it had long come to a standstill in theology.”[13]

And this has precisely been the leitmotif of Vatican II where, in Gaudium et spes #22, it reads: “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.” And the footnote: “For in all the form which was moulded in the clay, Christ was in his thoughts as the man who to be.”[14]


The Church as “Personal”

Israel is Subject as Spouse:

“For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name, and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; the God of the whole earth he is called. For the Lord ahs called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love, I will have compassion on you…”[15]

The Church is Subject as Spouse:

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the Church and delivered himself up for her” (Eph. 5, 25).[16]

The Church of Jesus Christ “subsistit in” the Hierarchical Catholic Church:
The quarrel is between the semantics of “est” and “subsistit in” (Lumen Gentium 38). Benedict has written that in the “Council: 'Subsistit In' Explains Church As Concrete Subject.

“At this point it becomes necessary to investigate the word subsistit somewhat more carefully. With this expression, the Council differs from the formula of Pius XII, who said in his Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi: "The Catholic Church `is' (est) the one mystical body of Christ". The difference between subsistit and est conceals within itself the whole ecumenical problem. The word subsistit derives from the ancient philosophy as later developed in Scholastic philosophy. The Greek word hypostasis that has a central role in Christology to describe the union of the divine and the human nature in the Person of Christ comes from that vision. Subsistere is a special case of esse. It is being in the form of a subject who has an autonomous existence. Here it is a question precisely of this. The Council wants to tell us that the Church of Jesus Christ as a concrete subject in this world can be found in the Catholic Church. This can take place only once, and the idea that the subsistit could be multiplied fails to grasp precisely the notion that is being intended. With the word subsistit, the Council wished to explain the unicity of the Catholic Church and the fact of her inability to be multiplied: the Church exists as a subject in historical reality”[17] (bold mine).

The Person of Mary as Icon of the Church:

“Mary and the Church are two, yet one single mother, two virgins and yet one. Each is mother, each is virgin. Both conceived by the same Spirit, without human seed. Both bore to God the Father a child unblemished. The one, without sin, gave birth to Christ’s body, the other restored His body through the power of the remission of sins. Both are the Mother of Christ, but neither can bring Him to birth without the other.”[18]

On December 8, 2005, Benedict XVI pointed to Mary Immaculate as “the inner structure” of Vatican Council II and “the orientation of its entire process” and “the key to understanding it:”

“[Mary] illuminates the inner structure of the Church’s teaching, which was developed at the Council. The Second Vatican Council had to pronounce on the institutional components of the Church: on the bishops and on the pontiff, on the priests, lay people and religious, in their communion and in their relations; it had to describe the Church journeying on, `clasping sinners to her bosom, at once holy and always in need of purification’ (Lumen Gentium, n. 8). This `Petrine’ aspect of the Church, however, is included in that `Marian’ aspect. In Mary, the Immaculate, we find the essence of the Church without distortion” (underline mine).

This identification of the Church with Mary is the thesis of a work by Hugo Rahner S.J. that Benedict endorsed as “one of the most important theological rediscoveries of the twentieth century.”[19] Rahner declares: “At first sight the strong Marian movement of our day seems to have little connection with this theology of the Church, and even perhaps to run counter to it…. It is to attempt to resolve this tension that this book has been written. It has one single object: to show from the warm-hearted theology of the great Fathers and Doctors that the whole mystery of the Church is inseparably bound up with the mystery of Mary. We need to learn once more what was so treasured by the early Church: to learn to see the Church in our Lady, and our Lady in the Church…. Let us begin by stating the fundamental truth, which is the basis of all that is to follow, and lies at the root of the early Christians’ teaching about the Church and love of the Church: Mary, the mother of Jesus, in virtue of the ineffable dignity of being the Virgin Mother of God made Man, became the essential symbol of the Church, our Mother”[20] (all emphasis mine).

Persons Remain Constant in Who They Are Only By Constant Change:

This is the Christian Anthropology enunciated by Gaudium et Spes #24: As a created yet constitutively relational being (made in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian Persons) “Man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself only by the sincere gift of himself.” The actual imaging occurs not because of the substantial gifts of intelligence and free will (which are potencies to achieve relationality) but in the actual achievement of relationality as self-giving (cf. John Paul II, “The Theology of the Body” Nov. 14, 1979).

Benedict borrows from Von Hildebrand who affirms that “the fluidity of existence that is required of the Christian is… `the exact opposite… of the cult of constant activity…’ Readiness to be changed by Christ has nothing to do with the lack of direction of a reed shaken by the wind: it has nothing to do with that indecisiveness about existence, that facile conformity that can be pushed in any direction. It is, rather, a standing-firm in Christ, a `standing-firm against all tendencies to change that come from below and a sensitive receptivity to every change that would mold us from above.’”[21] Benedict continues quoting: “Von Hildebrand rightly calls attention to the fact that this constancy in the way of discovered truth is something entirely different and must always be a ‘formal conservatism:’ its permanence is grounded in the enduring validity of truth. `The same motive that induces one endowed with continuity to cling imperturbably to truth will compel him also to be open to every new truth.’”[22] He then suggests: “I may, perhaps, be permitted a comparison from the realm of human relationships: Who really grows, strides ahead, makes progress as a human being? – the playboy, who slips from one fleeting encounter to another, who never has time really to know a `thou’? or the person who is truly constant in his Yes to another man, who goes forward with other, whose Yes never lapses into apathy but who learns slowly an ever more deeply from his Yes to give himself to this `thou’ and, in doing so, to find freedom, truth and love? The ability to remain constant in the Yes once given requires an unremitting readiness to change – a readiness in which one grows to maturity. In contrasting the two modes of change, von Hildebrand, I think, has made abundantly clear the true nature of the Christian readiness to change as opposed to that of the [Nazi] `cult of activity.’”[23]

I personally like to offer the image of surfing. In order to stay in the same spot on a wave moving perhaps 30 m.p.h. in which the water particles are not moving, the surfer must be moving faster than the wave itself and at an angle in order to stay in the same spot on the wave. It demands enormous suppleness to achieve constancy. So also in our progress as persons moving through space and time. We become who we are only by the constant mastery of self to make the self-gift in the ever-changing existential/moral situations in which we find ourselves, moment by moment.

Answering the Challenge of the Identity of the Church Before, During and After the Second Vatican Council


Here, we come to the core of the mind of Benedict XVI. He offers two perspectives: 1) The challenge of modernity as in the Enlightenment. Should we accept it, or reject it? And if we accept it, do conform to it, or, rather, do we absorb it by purifying it in the faith? and if so, how? 2) Historically, there has been a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture in the before, during and after of the Council. Benedict makes explicit reference to the rejection of the conciliar texts, and a “courageous” interpretation of the “spirit.” “In a word, it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the council but its spirit. In this way, obviously, a vast margin was left open for the question on how this spirit should subsequently be defined and room was consequently made for every whim.”[24]

His core response is the continuity-in-change of the Church as Subject. He said, “On the other [hand], there is the `hermeneutic of reform,’ of renewal in the continuity of the one subject church that the Lord has given to us. She is a subject that increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying people of God.”[25]

Benedict begins to build his case. He is beginning to help the Church cross the epistemological threshold from object to subject; from substance to person, from being-in-self to being-for-other whereby a dynamic resonating can take place between the gift of self and the becoming and finding of self.

1) Enter “Deus Caritas Est:” This encyclical is not about love as a facultative act and as such being an “accident” of a substance. He is offering the radically different way God is as Other, i.e. as a triple Relation that forms the unicity of the Communio that is God. And the human person – and no other - is created in the image and likeness of this Being. Hence, the being of man is different from every other created being, and in the dynamic of self-determination experiences the “loneliness” of being such an other. As such an “other” the human person in the act of faith and its sacrament, Baptism, enters into Christ as Bride-Body, the icon of which is the Virgin. Hence, the Church, being made up of such images of God, is a Subject with the same characteristics of permanence in becoming self by the change of self-gift.

2. On April 6, 2006, Benedict carried on a colloquium of questions and answers with the youth of Rome and the Lazio Region. To the first question which asked about how to understand Scripture and reach its deepest meaning, Benedict responded:

“Sacred Scripture has two subjects. First and foremost, the divine subject: it is God who is speaking. However, God wanted to involve man in his Word. Whereas Muslims are convinced that the Koran was verbally inspired by God we believe that for Sacred Scripture it is `synergy’ – as the theologians say – that is characteristic, the collaboration of God with man.

“God involves his People with his Word, hence, the second subject – the first subject, as I said, is God – is human. There are individual writers, but there is the continuity of a permanent subject – the People of God that journeys on with the Word of God and is in conversation with God. By listening to God, one learns to listen to the Word of God and then also to interpret it. Thus, the Word of God becomes present, because individual persons die but the vital subject, the People of God, is always alive and is identical in the course of the millenniums; it is always the same living subject in which the Word lives.

“This also explains many structures of Sacred Scripture, especially the so-called `rereading.’ An ancient text is reread in another book, let us say 100 years later, and what had been impossible to perceive in that earlier moment, although it was already contained in the previous text, is understood in-depth.

“And it is read again, ages later, and once again other aspects, other dimensions of the Word are grasped. So it was that Sacred Scripture developed, in this permanent rereading and rewriting in the context of profound continuity, in a continuous succession of the times of waiting.

“At last, with the coming of Christ and the experience of the Apostles, the Word became definitive. Thus, there can be no further rewriting, but a further deepening of our understanding continues to be necessary. The Lord said: `The Holy Spirit will guide you into depths tat you cannot fathom now.’

“Consequently, the communion of the Church is the living subject of Scripture. However, here too the principal subject is the Lord himself, who continues to speak through the Scriptures that we have in our hands.”[26]

Conclusion: Benedict has opted to listen to the Lord for his plan to govern the Church. That plan seems to be the assimilation and understanding of Vatican II and the 14 Encyclicals of John Paul II, together with the assimilation and purification of the “modern” Enlightenment. The implementation of that plan consists in understanding the Church and the human person as subject by the experience of listening to the Word of God and taking it in according to the model of the Virgin.


[1] Notebook #3, p. 15. “Cuando el Senor me daba aquellos golpes, por el ano treinta y uno, yo no lo entendia. Y do pronto, en medio de aquella amargura tan grande, esas palabras: tu eres my hijo (Ps. II, 7), tu eres Cristo. Y yo solo sabia repetir: Abba, Pater!; Abba!; Abba!; Abba!”
[2] Cf Lumen Gentium #10 that reads: “Though they differ essentially and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are none the less ordered one to another; each in its own proper way shares in the one priesthood of Christ.”
[3] F. Ocariz, “Vocation to Opus Dei as a Vocation in the Church,” Opus Dei in the Church Scepter (1994) 90.
[4] Ibid
[5] See Veritatis Splendor #85: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom.”
[6] Letter, November 28, 1995.
[7] Giving to God, Giving to Caesar: Encyclical Explains Church-State Relationship VATICAN CITY, FEB. 11, 2006 (Zenit.org).
[8] La Repubblica Rome, Nov. 19, 2004 (CWNews.com)
[9] SCDF, Dominus Iesus IV, #16.
[10] J. Ratzinger, “The Spiritual Basis and Ecclesial Identity of Theology,” in The Nature and Mission of Theology Ignatius (1995) 53-54.
[11] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 131-132.
[12] J. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (Fall, 1990) 445-450.
[13] Ibid. 450.
[14] Cf. Rom. 5, 14. Cf. Tertullian, De carnis resurrectione, 6; PL 2, 282; CSEL, 47, p. 33, 1. 12-13.
[15] Isaiah 54, 4-10.
[16] “If… this analogy illuminates the mystery, it in its turn is illuminated by that mystery. According to the author of Ephesians, the conjugal relationship which unites husband and wife should help us to understand the love which unites Christ to the Church, that reciprocal love between Christ and the Church in which the divine eternal plan for the salvation of man is realized. Yet the content of meaning of the analogy does not end here. The analogy used in Ephesians, illuminating the mystery of the relationship between Christ and the Church, contemporaneously unveils the essential truth about marriage;” John Paul II, The Theology of the Body, Pauline Books and Media (1997) 312.
[17] J. Ratzinger, “The Ecclesiology of the Constitution on the Church, Vatican II, `Lumen Gentium’” L’Osservatore Romano 2000.
[18] H. Rahner, “Our Lady and the Church,” Zaccheus Press - Bethesda (2004) xi-xii.
[19] Ibid. Jacket of H. Rahner’s book.
[20] Ibid. 5-6.
[21] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 62-64.
[22] Ibid
[23] Ibid
[24] Benedict XVI, “Interpreting Vatican II,” December 22, 2005, Address to the Curia Romana, Origins January 26, 2006, Vol 35, No. 32, 534-539.
[25] Ibid
[26] L’Osservatore Romano N. 15 – 12 April 2006, 6.