List of points

Would you explain the central mission and objectives of Opus Dei? On what precedent did you base your ideas for the Association? Or is Opus Dei something unique, totally new within the Church and Christianity? Can it be compared with religious orders and secular institutes, or with Catholic organisations like the Holy Name Society, the Knights of Columbus or the Christopher Movement?

Opus Dei aims to encourage people of every sector of society to desire holiness in the midst of the world. In other words, Opus Dei proposes to help ordinary citizens like yourself to lead a fully Christian life, without modifying their normal way of life, their daily work, their aspirations and ambitions.

As I wrote years ago, you could say that Opus Dei is as old and as new as the Gospel. It intends to remind Christians of the wonderful words of Genesis: God created man to work. We try to imitate the example of Christ, who spent almost all his life on earth working as a carpenter in a small town. Work is one of the highest human values and the way in which men contribute to the progress of society. But even more, it is a way to holiness.

With what other organisations can Opus Dei be compared? That question is not easy to answer. When one compares organisations which have spiritual aims, there is always a risk of considering external features or juridical status to the detriment of what is more important, the spirit that animates them and is the raison d'etre of all their activities.

I shall merely say that with respect to the organisations you mentioned, Opus Dei is very far removed from religious orders and secular institutes and close to institutions like the Holy Name Society.

Opus Dei is an international lay organisation to which a certain number of secular priests belong, although they are a small minority. Its members are people who live in the world and hold normal jobs. They do not join Opus Dei to give up their job. On the contrary, what they look for in the Work is the spiritual help they need to sanctify their ordinary work. Thus their work becomes a means to sanctify themselves and help others to do the same thing. They do not change their status. They continue being single, married, widowed or priests. What they try to do is serve God and their fellow men in their own state in life. Opus Dei is not interested in vows or promises. It asks its members to make an effort to practise human and Christian virtues, as children of God, despite the limitations and errors that are inevitable in human life.

If you want a point of comparison, the easiest way to understand Opus Dei is to consider the life of the early Christians. They lived their Christian vocation seriously, seeking earnestly the holiness to which they had been called by their Baptism. Externally they did nothing to distinguish themselves from their fellow citizens. The members of Opus Dei are ordinary people. They work like everyone else and live in the midst of the world just as they did before they joined. There is nothing false or artificial about their behaviour. They live like any other Christian citizen who wants to respond fully to the demands of his faith, because that is what they are.

In this context what is the role which Opus Dei has fulfilled, and is at present fulfilling?

It is not for me to evaluate the work which, through the grace of God, Opus Dei has done. All I will say is that the purpose of Opus Dei is to foster the search for holiness and the carrying out of the apostolate by Christians who live in the world, whatever their state in life or position in society.

The Work was born to help those Christians, who through their family, their friendships, their ordinary work, their aspirations, form part of the very texture of civil society, to understand that their life, just as it is, can be an opportunity for meeting Christ: that it is a way of holiness and apostolate. Christ is present in any honest human activity. The life of an ordinary Christian, which to some people may seem banal and petty, can and should be a holy and sanctifying life.

In other words: if you want to follow Christ, to serve the Church and help other men to recognise their eternal destiny, there is no need to leave the world or keep it at arm's length. You don't even need to take up an ecclesiastical activity. The only condition which is both necessary and sufficient is to fulfil the mission which God has given you, in the place and in the environment indicated by his Providence.

Since God wants the majority of Christians to remain in secular activities and to sanctify the world from within, the purpose of Opus Dei is to help them discover their divine mission, showing them that their human vocation — their professional, family and social vocation — is not opposed to their supernatural vocation. On the contrary, it is an integral part of it.

The one and only mission of Opus Dei is the spreading of this message, which comes from the Gospel, among all those who live and work in the world, whatever be their background, profession or trade. And to those who grasp this ideal of holiness, the Work offers the spiritual assistance and the doctrinal, ascetical and apostolic training which they need to put it into practice.

Members of Opus Dei do not act as a group. They act individually, with personal freedom and responsibility. Thus Opus Dei is not a 'closed organisation' or one which in some way gathers its members to isolate them from the rest of men. The 'corporate activities' which are the only ones the Work undertakes and for which it takes responsibility, are open to everyone with no type of social, cultural or religious discrimination. And the members, just because it is in the world that they seek sanctity, always work with the people with whom they are connected through their job or their participation in civic life.

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.

Opus Dei has sometimes be described as an intellectual elite which wants to permeate key political, financial and cultural sectors to control them from within, although with good intentions. Is this true?

Almost all the institutions which have brought a new message or have seriously tried to serve mankind by living Christianity fully have met with misunderstanding, especially at the beginning. That is why at the start some people did not understand the doctrine on lay apostolate which Opus Dei lived and proclaimed.

I must also add — although I do not like to talk about these things — that in our case there was also an organised and persistent campaign of misrepresentation. There were people who said we acted secretly (perhaps this was their own way of behaving), that we wanted to occupy important positions, etc. To be more specific, I can say that this campaign was begun, about thirty years ago, by a Spanish religious who later left his order and the Church. He married in a registry office and is now a Protestant minister. Once misrepresentation starts it is carried along for a time by its own momentum: because there are people who write without checking their information, and then not everyone acts as do competent journalists who, realising they are not infallible, are honest enough to make amends when they find out the truth. And this is what has happened in this case even though these slanders are contradicted by evidence that is clear to everyone, not to mention the fact that they appear incredible right from the word go. Anyway all this gossip to which you have referred concerns only Spain, and anyone who thinks that an international organisation like Opus Dei gravitates around the problems of one country has a short sighted and provincial outlook.

The majority of the members of Opus Dei — in Spain and elsewhere — are housewives, workers, shopkeepers, clerks, etc., people whose jobs carry no special political or social weight. The fact that a large number of workers are members of Opus Dei attracts no attention; but one politician, plenty. As far as I'm concerned the vocation to Opus Dei of a railway porter is as important as that of a company director. It's God who does the calling and in the works of God there is no room for discrimination and still less if it is based on demagoguism.

Anyone who, on seeing members of Opus Dei working in all the different fields of human activity, thinks only in terms of 'influence' and 'control', is simply showing what a poor conception of Christian life he has. Opus Dei has no power, and wants no power, over any temporal activity. All it wants is to spread a Gospel message, to all men who live in the world that God wants them to love Him and serve Him by, with and through their secular activities. It follows that the members of Opus Dei, who are ordinary Christians, work wherever and however they like. The only thing the Work does is to help them spiritually, so that they can always act with a Christian conscience.