List of points

The Decree 'Apostolicam Actuositatem', 5, clearly affirms that it is the mission of the whole Church to instil a Christian spirit in the temporal order. This mission therefore pertains to everyone: hierarchy, clergy, religious and laity. Could you tell us how you see the role and function of each of these sectors in the Church in this single common mission?

You will find, in fact, that the answer is given in the Council documents. The role of the hierarchy is to point out, as part of its Magisterium, the doctrinal principles which must preside over and illuminate the carrying out of this apostolic task (cf Constitution Lumen Gentium, 28; Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 43; Decree Apostolicam Actuositatem, 24).

The immediate task of directly ordering temporal realities in the light of the doctrinal principles enunciated by the Magisterium corresponds specifically to the laity, who work immersed in all the circumstances and structures of secular life. But, at the same time, they must act with the necessary personal autonomy in making concrete decisions in their social, family, political and cultural life (cf. Constitution Lumen Gentium, 31; Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 43; Decree Apostolicam Actuositatem, 7).

The mission of religious, who separate themselves from secular realities and activities to take up a particular state of life, is to give public eschatological witness, which helps to remind the rest of the faithful that the earth is not their permanent home (cf Constitution Lumen Gentium, 44; Decree Perfectae Charitatis, 5). The numerous works of charity and social welfare, which so many religious men and women carry out with a great spirit of self-sacrifice, also constitute a contribution towards instilling Christian spirit into the temporal order.

Could you describe the differences in the way Opus Dei as an association fulfils its mission and the way the members of Opus Dei as individuals fulfil theirs; for example, by what criteria is a project deemed best undertaken by the Association, such as a school or conference centre, or by individuals such as a publishing or commercial venture?

The main activity of Opus Dei is offering its members, and other people, the spiritual means they need to live as good Christians in the midst of the world. It helps them to learn Christ's doctrine and the Church's teachings. Its spirit moves them to work well for the love of God and as a service to other men. In a word, it helps them to behave like genuine Christians: being loyal friends, respecting the legitimate freedom of others, and trying to make our world more just.

Each member earns his living and serves society in the job he held before joining the Work and would hold if he did not belong to Opus Dei. There are miners, teachers, housewives, shopkeepers, university professors, secretaries, farmers, etc. A member of Opus Dei can carry on any noble human activity, no honest work is excluded. For instance, a publisher or a business man who joins the Work continues to hold the position he held before. And if he looks for a new job, or decides with other business men to form a company of one sort or another, he decides freely, accepting personally the results of his work and answering personally for its success or failure.

All the activity of Opus Dei's directors is based on a great respect for the members' professional freedom. This point is of capital importance. The Work's very existence depends on it, so no exceptions are admitted. A member's job is in no way related to his membership. Consequently, neither the Work nor any of the other members has anything to do with his professional activities. Joining the Work only implies an obligation to make an honest effort to seek holiness in and through one's job and to be more fully aware of the service to humanity that every Christian life should be.

As I was saying, the principal mission of Opus Dei is to give a Christian formation to its members and to other people who wish to receive it. However, moved by a desire to contribute to the solution of each society's problems, which are so closely related to the Christian ideal, it also has some other corporate activities. Our criterion here is that Opus Dei, whose aims are exclusively spiritual, can only conduct corporately, activities which clearly constitute an immediate Christian service, an apostolate. It would be ridiculous to think that Opus Dei as such could mine coal or run any type of commercial venture. Its corporate works are all directly apostolic activities: training centres for farm workers, medical dispensaries in developing countries or areas, schools for girls from under-privileged families. In other words, educational or welfare activities like those carried on throughout the world by organisations of every religious creed.

In these activities we count in the first place on the work of Opus Dei's members who occasionally work full time in them, and also on the generous help of many other people, Christian and non-Christian alike. Some of them help us for spiritual reasons. Others do not share our apostolic motives, but they see that these activities benefit society and are open to everyone, without any kind of racial, religious or ideological discrimination.

Monsignor, the presence of women in social life is extending far beyond the sphere of the family, in which they have moved almost exclusively up to now. What do you think about this development? What, in your opinion, are the main characteristics that women have to develop if they are to fulfil their mission?

Firstly, let me say that I do not think there need be any conflict between one's family life and social life. Just as in a man's life, but with particular shades of difference, the home and the family will always occupy a central place in the life of a woman. For it is obvious that when she spends time on her family she is fulfilling a great human and Christian role. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the possibility of her having other professional work — for housework is also professional work — in any worthwhile employment available in the society in which she lives. I can understand why you state the problem the way you do. But I think that if we systematically contrast work in the home with outside work, retaining the old dichotomy which was formerly used to maintain that a woman's place was in the home but switching the stress, it could easily lead, from the social point of view, to a greater mistake than that which we are trying to correct because it would be more serious if it led women to give up their work in the home.

Even on the personal level one cannot flatly affirm that a woman has to achieve her perfection only outside the home, as if time spent on her family were time stolen from the development of her personality. The home — whatever its characteristics, because a single woman should also have a home — is a particularly suitable place for the growth of her personality. The attention she gives to her family will always be a woman's greatest dignity. In the care she takes of her husband and children or, to put it in more general terms, in her work of creating a warm and formative atmosphere around her, a woman fulfils the most indispensable part of her mission. And so it follows that she can achieve her personal perfection there.

What I have just said does not go against her participating in other aspects of social life including politics. In these spheres, too, women can offer a valuable personal contribution, without neglecting their special feminine qualities. They will do this to the extent to which they are humanly and professionally equipped. Both family and society clearly need this special contribution, which is in no way secondary to that of men.

Development, maturity, emancipation of women should not mean a pretence of equality, of uniformity with men, a servile imitation of a man's way of doing things. That would not get us anywhere. Women would turn out losers, not because they are better than men or worse, but because they are different.

In terms of fundamentals, one can in fact speak of equal rights which should be legally recognised, both in civil and ecclesiastical law. Women, like men, possess the dignity of being persons and children of God. Nevertheless, on this basis of fundamental equality, each must achieve what is proper to him or her. In this sense a woman's emancipation means that she should have a real possibility of developing her own potentialities to the fullest extent — those which she has personally and those which she has in common with other women. Equal rights and equal opportunities before the law do not suppress this diversity, which enriches all mankind. They presuppose and encourage it.

Women are called to bring to the family, to society and to the Church, characteristics which are their own and which they alone can give: their gentle warmth and untiring generosity, their love for detail, their quick-wittedness and intuition, their simple and deep piety, their constancy… A woman's femininity is genuine only if she is aware of the beauty of this contribution for which there is no substitute and if she incorporates it into her own life.

To fulfil this mission, a woman has to develop her own personality and not let herself be carried away by a naive desire to imitate, which, as a rule, would tend to put her in an inferior position and leave her unique qualities unfulfilled. If she is a mature person, with a character and mind of her own, she will indeed accomplish the mission to which she feels called, whatever it may be. Her life and work will be really constructive, fruitful and full of meaning, whether she spends the day dedicated to her husband and children or whether, having given up the idea of marriage for a noble reason, she has given herself fully to other tasks.

Each woman in her own sphere of life, if she is faithful to her divine and human vocation can and, in fact, does achieve the fullness of her feminine personality. Let us remember that Mary, Mother of God and Mother of men, is not only a model but also a proof of the transcendental value of an apparently unimportant life.

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 continue to harbour a hope, which corresponds to justice and to the living experience of many countries, that the time will come when the Spanish government will contribute its share to lighten the burden of a task which seeks no private profit, but on the contrary is totally dedicated to the service of society, and tries to work efficiently for the present and future prosperity of the nation.

And now, my sons and daughters, let me consider for a moment, another aspect of everyday life which is particularly dear to me. I refer to human love, to the noble love between a man and a woman, to courtship and marriage. I want to say once again that this holy human love is not something merely to be permitted or tolerated alongside the true activities of the spirit, as might be insinuated by false spiritualism to which I alluded previously. I have been preaching just the contrary, in speech and in writing, for forty years and now those who did not understand are beginning to grasp the point.

Love which leads to marriage and family, can also be a marvellous divine way, a vocation, a path for a complete dedication to our God. What I have told you about doing things perfectly, about putting love into the little duties of each day, about discovering that 'divine something' contained in these details, finds a special place in that vital sphere in which human love is enclosed.

All of you who are professors or students or work in any capacity in the University of Navarra, know that I have entrusted your love to holy Mary, Mother of Fair Love. And here on the university campus you have the shrine which we built with devotion, as a place where you may pray to Her and offer that wonderful pure love on which She bestows Her blessing.

'Surely you know that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit, Who is God's gift to you, so that you are no longer your own masters?' (1 Cor 6:19). How many times, in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of Fair Love, will you reply with a joyful affirmation, to the Apostle's question: Yes, we know that this is so and we want, with your powerful help, to live it, O Virgin Mother of God!

Contemplative prayer will rise within you whenever you meditate on this impressive reality: something as material as my body has been chosen by the Holy Spirit as His dwelling place… I no longer belong to myself… my body and soul, my whole being, belongs to God… And this prayer will be rich in practical consequences, drawn from the great consequence which the Apostle himself proposed: 'glorify God in your bodies' (1 Cor 6:20).

I must finish now. I told you at the beginning that I wanted to announce to you something of the greatness and mercy of God. I think I have done so, in talking to you about sanctifying your everyday life. A holy life in the midst of secular reality, lived without fuss. with simplicity, with truthfulness. Is this not today the most moving manifestation of the magnalia Dei (Sir 18:5), of those prodigious mercies which God has always worked, and does not cease to work, in order to save the world?

Now I ask you with the Psalmist to unite yourselves to my prayer and my praise: Magnificate Dominum mecum, et extollamus nomen eius simul: 'Praise the Lord with me, let us extol His name together' (Ps 33:4). In other words, dearly beloved, let us live by Faith.

Let us take up the Shield of Faith, the Helmet of Salvation and the Sword of the Spirit, which are God's Word, as St. Paul encourages us to do in the Epistle to the Ephesians (6:11 ff), which was read in the liturgy a few moments ago.

Faith is a virtue which we Christians need greatly, and in a special way in this 'Year of Faith' which our beloved Holy Father, Pope Paul VI has decreed. For without faith, we lack the very foundation for the sanctification of everyday life.

A living Faith in these moments, because we are drawing near to the mysterium fidei (1 Tim 3:9), to the Holy Eucharist; because we are about to participate in our Lord's Pasch, which sums up and brings about the mercies of God among men.

Faith, my sons, in order to acknowledge that within a few moments upon this altar 'the Work of our Redemption' is going to be renewed. Faith, so as to savour the Creed and to experience, upon this altar and in this Assembly, the presence of Christ, Who makes us cor unum et anima una (Acts 4:32), one heart and one soul, a family, a Church which is One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, which for us means the same as universal.

Faith, finally, my beloved daughters and sons, to show the world that all this is not just ceremonies and words, but a divine reality, by presenting to mankind the testimony of an ordinary life which is made holy, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and of holy Mary.