When St. Josemaria
received the vocation of 10/2/28, he received a “message” that was not a
“general insight into the universal call to holiness…”[1] Rather, he was being shown
that “the holiness originating in and founded on baptism to which God is
calling Christians is holiness in the
midst of the world.”[2] His mission was not in any
sense to replace religious orders but "to fan everyone's baptismal grace and
channel it toward work and other duties - secular realities which will thereby
take their rightful place in people's awareness and daily agenda as the
scenario for their 'obedience of faith.' Ordinary life then becomes the setting
where one responds to the baptismal call to holiness.”[3]
The point is that St. Josemaria did not receive the call to found an
institution but to spread the message of the universal call to holiness for
everyone, everywhere. But that is the Church herself as institution.
D. Pedro
Rodriguez writes that the message "addresses not one particular group,
but everyone, with no limitations of gender, race, age, job, social background,
civilian status, political views ro secular creed. It seeks only to help to fan
everyone's baptismal grace and channel it toward work and other duties -
secular realities which will thereby take their rightful place in people's
awareness and daily agenda as the scenario for their 'obedience of faith.'
Ordinary life then becomes the setting where one responds to the baptismal call
to holiness. From the very start this was Josemaria Escriva's apostolic horizon
and task; initially, he worked alone at the job God had given him - to do Opus
Dei. ... Josemaria Escriva saw with noonday clarity that, in the daily
discharge of God's will, spreading the message was inseparably linked to
'convoking' men and women who would make it their raison d’être, committing themselves to carry it to all
nations. He saw that the nascent institution was internally dominated by the
'message;' the institution would be the instrument and echo chamber for the
God-given message... [So] (t)he message is the first thing God is concerned
about; the institution is something he desires insofar as it can spread it. The
message, therefore, determines the institution's end, mission and structure;
the institution is to be understood in view of the message, which thus becomes
the theological criterion to direct and discern the way it develops,
institutionally, apostolically or pastorally."[4]
The obvious question: since the Christ has
called all without exception (“Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”
[Mt . 5, 44], why Opus Dei?
The reason that Rodriguez develops
is the same as announced by Escriva somewhere: that the Church always had the
doctrine but lost the experience of many people seeking sanctity in the world,
and this because of the rise of the religious order after the cessation of the
persecutions in the 4th and 5th centuries. The heroism of
living the faith began to be lost in the world and the search for heroic love
was begun “outside” the world in very narrow circumstances, and particularly
not in family life since intrinsic to the emerging canonical religious state
was chastity, but understood as celibacy. Absent the experience, absent the
consciousness that accrues to it. Sanctity in the world and family life was
forgotten as a universal phenomenon.
This brings us to the Synod of 2015 and the formation and search for holiness (self gift: Christian Faith) as integral to its validity as sacrament.
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