List of points

We know that men and women of all walks of life, single and married people, belong to Opus Dei What is the common element in the vocation to Opus Dei? What commitments does each member undertake in order to attain the aims of Opus Dei?

I can put it in very few words: to look for holiness in the middle of the world, 'nel bel mezzo della strada' as an Italian phrase has it. A person who receives from God the specific vocation to Opus Dei is convinced that he must achieve holiness in his own state in life, in his work, whether it be manual or intellectual, and he lives accordingly. I say 'he's convinced… and he lives accordingly' because it is not a matter of accepting a simple theoretical proposition, but rather of putting it into practice day after day, in ordinary life.

If you want to achieve holiness — in spite of your personal shortcomings and miseries, which will last as long as you live — you must make an effort, with God's grace, to practise charity which is the fullness of the law and the bond of perfection. Charity is not something abstract. It entails a real, complete, self-giving to the service of God and all men; to the service of that God who speaks to us in the silence of prayer and in the hubbub of the world and of those men whose existence is interwoven with our own. By living charity Love — you live all the human and supernatural virtues demanded of a Christian. These virtues form a unity and cannot be reduced to a mere list. You can not have charity without justice, solidarity, family and social responsibility, poverty, joy, chastity, friendship…

You can see immediately that the practice of these virtues leads to apostolate. In fact it already is apostolate. For when people try to live in this way in the middle of their daily work, their Christian behaviour becomes good example, witness, something which is a real and effective help to others. They learn to follow in the footsteps of Christ, who 'began to do and to teach' (Acts 1:1), joining example to word. That is why, for these past forty years, I have been calling this apostolate an 'apostolate of friendship and confidence'.

All the members of Opus Dei have this same desire for holiness and apostolate. And so, in the Work, there are no degrees or categories of membership. The vocation to Opus Dei is one and the same. It is a call to commit oneself personally, freely and responsibly to try to carry out the will of God, that is what God wants each individual to do. What there is, is a multitude of personal situations, the situation of each member in the world, to which the same specific vocation is adapted.

As you can see, the pastoral phenomenon of Opus Dei is something born 'from below', from the everyday lives of Christians who live and work alongside the rest of men. Thus it does not form part of the secularising process, the 'desacralization' of monastic or religious life. It is not a link in the chain which is drawing the religious closer to the world.

When a person receives the vocation to Opus Dei he acquires a new vision of the things around him. He sees social relationships, his profession, his interests, his sorrows and his joys in a new light. But not for a moment does he stop living in the midst of them. Thus one cannot speak of adaptation to the world or to modern society. No one adapts himself to what is part and parcel of himself: with respect to what is proper to himself he simply is. His vocation is the same as that which those fishermen, peasants, merchants or soldiers received in their heart as they sat at Jesus' feet in Galilee and heard him say: 'You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect' (Matt 5:48).

Let me put it this way: the perfection which a member of Opus Dei looks for is the perfection proper to a Christian. It is the same perfection to which every Christian is called and it consists in living fully the requirements of the Faith. We are not interested in 'evangelical perfection', which is regarded as proper to the religious and to some institutions established on religious lines. Still less are we interested in the 'life of evangelical perfection', which in Canon Law refers to the religious state.

I consider the religious vocation a blessed one and one which the Church needs, and anyone who did not venerate that vocation would not have the spirit of the Work. But it is not my vocation, nor that of the members of Opus Dei. You can say that, in coming to Opus Dei, each and every member has come on the explicit condition of not changing his state in life. The specific characteristic of our way is to sanctify one's state in life in the world, and to be sanctified in the place of one's meeting with Christ. This is the commitment which each member takes on to attain the aims of Opus Dei.

Could you tell me about the expansion of the Work during the past forty years? What are its most important apostolic activities?

I must say, first of all, that I thank God our Lord for letting me see the Work spread throughout the world only forty years after its beginning. When it was born — in Spain, in 1928 it was born Roman (which, to me, means Catholic, universal). And its first aim was, inevitably, to spread to all countries.

Looking back on these years, I recall a number of things which make me very happy: bound up with the difficulties which are in some way the salt of life. I think of the efficacy of God's grace and the cheerful self-giving of so many men and women who have kept faith. For, I want to stress that the essential apostolate of Opus Dei is the apostolate that each member carries out in his own place of work, with his family, among his friends — an apostolate which does not attract attention, which cannot easily be expressed in statistics but which yields holiness in thousands of souls who keep on following Christ, quietly and effectively during their ordinary everyday work.

There is nothing more I can say on this subject. I could tell you about the exemplary lives of so many people — but if I did that I would take away the intimacy and destroy the human and divine creativity of these lives: to reduce it to statistics would be even worse — and a waste of time, because the fruit of grace cannot be measured.

But I can add something about the apostolic activities the members of the Work conducted in different parts of the world — activities with spiritual aims in which they try to work with dedication and with human perfection also, and in which so many other people also cooperate: they may not be members of the Work but they appreciate the supernatural value of this activity — or its human value, as in the case of so many people who are not Christians and are such an effective help. These are always lay, secular activities, the initiative of ordinary citizens using their civic rights in accordance with the law of the country and they are always approached in a professional way. In other words, they in no way depend on privilege or special favour.

I am sure you know one of the projects of this kind being carried on in Rome: the ELIS Centre, which gives technical and general human training to young people by means of schools, sports and cultural activities, libraries etc. It is an activity which meets needs in Rome and in particular in the Tiburtino area. The same sort of thing is being done in Chicago, Madrid, Mexico and many other places.

Another example is Strathmore College of Arts and Sciences in Nairobi — a pre-university high school which has served hundreds of students from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Through this college a number of Kenyans in Opus Dei, together with fellow citizens, are doing very useful work in the educational field. It was the first educational establishment in East Africa which brought about complete racial integration and through its work it has contributed much to the Africanisation of culture. Kianda College, also in Nairobi, is a similar enterprise, devoted to the education of young women.

Just to take one more example, I should like to mention the University of Navarra. Since it was founded in 1952, it has developed eighteen faculties and institutes with a student enrolment of over six thousand. Contrary to some newspaper reports, the University of Navarra has not been supported by State aid. The Spanish State has contributed nothing to maintenance costs, all it has done is give some subventions to increase the enrolment. The University survives thanks to the help of private individuals and associations. Its teaching system and the pattern of its university life, which are a functions of personal responsibility and solidarity of all who take part in the University, have provided valuable experience in the light of the situation of Universities today.

I could refer to other kinds of activities in the United States, Japan, Argentina, Australia, the Philippines, Ireland, France, etc. But I do not think it is necessary: it is enough to say simply that Opus Dei is today spread to the five continents and that it is comprised of people of over seventy nationalities, of all races and backgrounds.