List of points

You have been saying and writing for many years that the vocation of the laity consists of three things: 'to sanctify work, to sanctify themselves in work, and to sanctify others through work'. Could you explain exactly what you mean by sanctifying work?

It is difficult to explain it in a few words, because the expression 'sanctifying work' involves fundamental concepts of the theology of Creation. What I have always taught, over the last forty years, is that a Christian should do all honest human work, be it intellectual or manual, with the greatest perfection possible: with human perfection (professional competence) and with Christian perfection (for love of God's Will and as a service to mankind). Human work done in this manner, no matter how humble or insignificant it may seem, helps to shape the world in a Christian way. The world's divine dimension is made more visible and our human labour is thus incorporated into the marvellous work of Creation and Redemption. It is raised to the order of grace. It is sanctified and becomes God's work, operatio Dei, opus Dei.

We have reminded Christians of the wonderful words of Genesis which tell us that God created man so that he might work, and we have concentrated on the example of Christ, who spent most of His life on earth working as a craftsman in a village. We love human work which He chose as His state in life, which He cultivated and sanctified. We see in work, in men's noble creative toil not only one of the highest human values, an indispensable means to social progress and to greater justice in the relations between men, but also a sign of God's Love for His creatures, and of men's love for each other and for God: we see in work a means of perfection, a way to sanctity.

Hence, the sole objective of Opus Dei has always been to see to it that there be men and women of all races and social conditions who endeavour to love and to serve God and the rest of mankind in and through their ordinary work, in the midst of the realities and interests of the world.

You have spoken a lot about work. What place would you say work occupies in the spirituality of Opus Dei?

The vocation to Opus Dei in no way changes or modifies a person's condition or state in life. And since man's condition, his lot, is to work, the supernatural vocation to holiness and apostolate according to the spirit of Opus Dei confirms this human vocation to work. The vast majority of the members of the Work are lay people, ordinary Christians. Their condition consists in having a profession or trade which is often absorbing and by means of which they earn their living, support their family, contribute to the common good, and develop their own personality.

The vocation to Opus Dei confirms all this: to such an extent that one of the essential signs of this vocation is precisely a determination to remain in the world and to do a job as perfectly as possible (taking into account, of course, one's personal imperfections), both from the human and from the supernatural point of view. This means it must be a job which contributes effectively towards both the building up of the earthly city — and therefore it must be done competently and in a spirit of service; and to the consecration of the world — and in this regard it must both sanctify and be sanctified.

Those who want to live their Faith perfectly and to do apostolate according to the spirit of Opus Dei, must sanctify themselves with their work, must sanctify their work and sanctify others through their work. It is while they work alongside their equals, their fellow working men from whom they are in no way different, they strive to identify themselves with Christ, imitating His thirty years in the workshop in Nazareth.

Ordinary work is not only the context in which they should become holy. It is the 'raw material' of their holiness. It is there in the ordinary happenings of their day's work that they discover the hand of God and find the stimulus for their life of prayer. This same professional job brings them into contact with other people — relatives, friends, colleagues — and with the great problems which affect their society and the world at large; and it affords them the opportunity to live that self-giving in the service of others which is essential for Christians. This is where they should strive to give a true and genuine witness to Christ so that all may get to know and love our Lord and discover that their normal life in the world, their everyday work, can be an encounter with God.

In other words, holiness and apostolate and the ordinary life of the members of the Work come to form one and the same thing, and that is why work is the hinge of their spiritual life. Their self-giving to God is grafted on to the work which they were doing before they came to Opus Dei and which they continue to do after they join.

In the early years of my pastoral work, when I began to preach these ideas, some people did not understand me, and others were scandalised: they were so accustomed to hearing the world spoken of in a pejorative way. Our Lord had made me understand, and I tried to make other people understand, that the world is good, for the works of God are always perfect, and that it is we men who make the world bad, through our sins.

I said then, as I do now, that we must love the world, because it is in the world that we meet God: God shows Himself, He reveals Himself to us in the happenings and events of the world.

Good and evil are mixed in human history, and therefore the Christian should be a man of judgement. But this judgement should never bring him to deny the goodness of God's works. On the contrary, it should bring him to recognise the hand of God working through all human actions, even those which betray our fallen nature. You could make a good motto for Christian life out of these words of St Paul: 'All things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's' (1 Cor 3:22-23), and so carry out the plans of that God whose will it is to save the world.

In the homily you gave in Pamplona last October during the Mass you celebrated at the Assembly of the Friends of the University of Navarra, you spoke of human love in words which made a deep impression on us. Many readers have written commenting on the impact they felt on hearing you. What would you say are the most important values of Christian marriage?

The majority of the members of Opus Dei are married people, so in this field I can speak from the experience of many years of priestly activity in many countries. For the married members of Opus Dei human love and marriage duties are part of their divine vocation. Opus Dei has made of marriage a divine way, avocation, and this has many consequences for personal holiness and for apostolate. I have spent almost forty years preaching the vocational meaning of marriage. More than once I have had occasion to see faces light up as men and women, who had thought that in their lives a dedication to God was incompatible with a noble and pure human love, heard me say that marriage is a divine path on earth!

The purpose of marriage is to help married people sanctify themselves and others. For this reason they receive a special grace in the sacrament which Jesus Christ instituted. Those who are called to the married state will, with the grace of God, find within their state everything they need to be holy, to identify themselves each day more with Jesus Christ, and to lead those with whom they live to God.

That is why I always look upon Christian homes with hope and affection, upon all the families which are the fruit of the Sacrament of Matrimony. They are a shining witness of the great divine mystery of Christ's loving union with His Church which St. Paul calls sacramentum magnum, a great sacrament (Eph 5:32). We must strive so that these cells of Christianity may be born and may develop with a desire for holiness, conscious of the fact that the Sacrament of Initiation — Baptism — confers on all Christians a divine mission that each must fulfil in his own walk of life.

Christian couples should be aware that they are called to sanctity themselves and to sanctify others, that they are called to be apostles and that their first apostolate is in the home. They should understand that founding a family, educating their children, and exercising a Christian influence in society, are supernatural tasks. The effectiveness and the success of their life — their happiness — depends to a great extent on their awareness of their specific mission.

But they mustn't forget that the secret of married happiness lies in everyday things, not in daydreams. It lies in finding the hidden joy of coming home in the evening, in affectionate relations with their children, in the everyday work in which the whole family cooperates; in good humour in the face of difficulties that should be met with a sporting spirit; in making the best use of all the advantages that civilisation offers to help us rear children, to make the house pleasant and life more simple.

I constantly tell those who have been called by God to form a home to love one another always, to love each other with the love of their youth. Any one who thinks that love ends when the worries and difficulties that life brings with it begin, has a poor idea of marriage, which is a sacrament and an ideal and a vocation, It is precisely then that love grows strong. Torrents of worries and difficulties are incapable of drowning true love because people who sacrifice themselves generously together are brought closer by their sacrifice. As Scripture says, aquae multae, a host of difficulties, physical and moral, non potuerunt extinguere caritatem, cannot extinguish love (Cant 8:7).

I do not understand how Catholics and even priests have for years advised, with an easy conscience, the use of the pill to prevent conception. The teachings of the Popes cannot be disregarded just like that. Nor ought they to allege, as they do with incredible flippancy, that the Pope when he does not speak ex cathedra is simply a private theologian subject to error. To say nothing of the tremendous arrogance it supposes to affirm that the Pope makes mistakes, while they do not.

Besides, they forget that the Pope is not only a teacher, and infallible when he says so expressly, but also the chief Legislator. In this case Pope Paul VI has laid down in unequivocal terms that all the dispositions of the much revered Pius XII in this very delicate matter are still binding and must necessarily be followed. Moreover, Pius XII only permitted some natural procedures — not the pill — to avoid conception in isolated and difficult cases. To advise the contrary is, therefore, a serious act of disobedience to the Holy Father in a grave matter.

I could write a huge volume on the disastrous consequences that the use of these, and other contraceptives, brings with it, namely: the break down of married love (the married couple come to see each other as accomplices rather than as husband and wife), unhappiness, infidelity, mental and spiritual distress, great harm to the children, a loss of married peace… However, I do not think it is necessary to go into all this; I prefer simply to obey the Pope. If, at some time, he were to decide that the use of a particular medicine were licit to prevent conception, I should adapt myself to whatever he said. And, following the norms established by the Pope and those of moral theology, I would examine in each case the evident dangers to which I have just referred and I would give my advice in conscience to each individual.

And I would always bear in mind that our present-day world will not be saved by men who aim to drug the spiritual life and reduce everything to a question of economics or material well-being. Its salvation will come from men and women who know that moral law is geared to man's eternal destiny, who have faith in God and generously face up to the demands of their Faith, helping those around them to appreciate the transcendental meaning of our life on earth.

This certainty should lead them not to encourage escapism, but to ensure effectively that all men have the necessary material resources, that there be work for all and that no one finds himself unjustly confined in his social and family life.

Throughout this interview you have commented on important aspects of human life, in particular those which refer to women, and on the value that is given to them in the spirit of Opus Dei. In conclusion, could you give us your opinion as to how the role of women in the life of the Church can best be promoted?

I must admit this question tempts me to go against my usual practice and to give instead a polemical answer, because the term 'Church' is frequently used in a clerical sense as meaning 'proper to the clergy or the Church hierarchy'. And therefore many people understand participation in the life of the Church simply, or at least principally, as helping in the parish, cooperating in associations which have a mandate from the hierarchy, taking an active part in the liturgy and so on.

Such people forget in practice, though they may claim it in theory, that the Church comprises all the People of God. All Christians go to make up the Church. Therefore the Church is present wherever there is a Christian who strives to live in the name of Christ.

In saying this, I am not seeking to minimise the importance of the role of women in the life of the Church. On the contrary, I consider it indispensable. I have spent my life defending the fullness of the Christian vocation of the laity, of ordinary men and women who live in the world, and I have tried to obtain full theological and legal recognition of their mission in the Church and in the world. I only want to point out that some people advocate an unjustifiable limitation of this collaboration. I must insist that ordinary Christians can carry out their specific mission — including their mission in the Church — only if they resist clericalisation and carry on being secular and ordinary, that is, people who live in the world and take part in the affairs and interests of the world.

It is the task of the millions of Christian men and women who fill the earth to bring Christ into all human activities and to announce through their lives the fact that God loves and wants to save everyone. The best and most important way in which they can participate in the life of the Church, and indeed the way which all other ways presuppose, is by being truly Christian precisely where they are, in the place to which their human vocation has called them.

It is very moving to think of so many Christian men and women who, perhaps without any specific resolve, are living simple, ordinary lives and trying to make them a living embodiment of the Will of God. There is an urgent need in the Church to make these people conscious of the sublime value of their lives, to reveal to them that what they are doing, unimportant though it appears, has an eternal value, to urge them, to teach them to listen more attentively to the voice of God who speaks to them through everyday events and situations. God is urging the Church to fulfil this task, the task of making the entire world Christian from within, showing that Christ has redeemed all mankind.

Women will participate in this task in the ways that are proper to them, both in the home and in other occupations which they carry out, developing their special characteristics to the full.

The main thing is that like Mary, who was a woman, a virgin and a mother, they live with their eyes on God, repeating her words fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum — 'be it done unto me according to Thy word' (Luke 1:38). On these words depends the faithfulness to one's personal vocation — which is always unique and non-transferable in each case — which will make us all cooperators in the work of salvation which God carries out in us and in the entire world.

I have taught this constantly using words from holy Scripture. The world is not evil, because it has come from God's hands, because it is His creation, because 'Yahweh looked upon it and saw that it was good' (cf Gen 1:7 ff). We ourselves, mankind, make it evil and ugly with our sins and infidelities. Have no doubt: any kind of evasion of the honest realities of daily life is for you, men and women of the world, something opposed to the will of God.

On the contrary, you must understand now, more clearly, that God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, material and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.

I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the thirties that they had to know how to 'materialise' their spiritual life. I wanted to keep them from the temptation, so common then and now, of living a kind of double life. On one side, an interior life, a life of relation with God; and on the other, a separate and distinct professional, social and family life, full of small earthly realities.

No! We cannot lead a double life. We cannot be like schizophrenics, if we want to be Christians. There is just one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is this life which has to become, in both soul and body, holy and filled with God. We discover the invisible God in the most visible and material things.

There is no other way. Either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or else we shall never find Him. That is why I can tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to the most trivial occurrences and situations their noble and original meaning. It needs to restore them to the service of the Kingdom of God, to spiritualize them, turning them into a means and an occasion for a continuous meeting with Jesus Christ.