90 Anniversary of the Ordination to Priesthood of St. Josemaria Escriva on March 28 1925.

 The 50^th was Good Friday in 1975.

1)    The received understanding of priesthood is mediation between this and that.

2)    Since Christ is God-man, He mediates between Himself and the Father.  That is, the divine, uncreated “I” of the Son masters and subdues the human will [Jn. 6, 38] he received from the Virgin (the Virgin gives the  body that must have a concomitant human, created soul with faculties of intellect and will), and obeys the Will of the Father to go to the Cross.

3)    Uniquely, then, Christ does not mediate between this and that external thing, but between Himself and the Father in the doing of this and that. He is Priest in His reality as God-man. He enters the presence of the Father not with the blood of bulls and goats, but with His own (Heb. 9).

4)    Since Christ is the revelation and prototype of man (Col. 1, 15; GS

 #22), then the anthropology is Christological, and therefore, priestly.  That is, it is impossible for man to be man, and not be priest. This obviously includes women. It is the grounding of the Christological anthropology of GS #24: “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself, by the sincere gift of self.”

5)    Therefore, man exercises the priesthood of Jesus Christ in his every secular act.  And besides, man becomes Christ precisely by that very secular act. The secular world, then becomes the occasion of the heights of sanctity.

6)    Generating oneself as Christ in the middle of the world is known as “secularity.” “Secularity is something Christian, a Christian way of being and living. In other words, our divine vocation… cannot be judged from the starting-point of a secularity defined a priori. Rather, secularity should be judged from the starting-point of our vocation, and what the Christian faith reveals to us about man, about the world and about our destiny” (Letter from the Prelate of Opus Dei, November 28, 1995).

7)    Hence, the vocabulary used is “priestly soul” for every one who makes the gift of self in the execution of secular, ordinary work.