Freedom leads to service; serving the Church

The legitimate freedom of upright men and women leads them, with the help of grace, to want to serve God and all mankind. Servite Domino in veritate (Tob 14:10): serve the Lord in truth, Tobias exhorted his children. And I now say the same to you, for we have received God’s call to render a particular service to his Church and to all souls. The sole ambition, the only desire of Opus Dei and of each of its children is to serve the Church as She wants to be served, within the specific vocation that the Lord has given us.

Serving society, with exclusively supernatural goals

Nos sumus servi Dei caeli et terrae (Ezra 5:11), we are servants of the God of heaven and earth. Our whole life, my daughters and sons, is a service with exclusively supernatural goals, because Opus Dei is not, and never will be – it cannot be otherwise – a worldly entity. But, at the same time, you serve the human race, because you are not trying to do anything other than attain Christian perfection in the world uprightly, with your fully free and responsible action in all spheres fields of civil society. Unselfish service, which does not debase, but educates; it dilates the heart, making it Roman in the best sense of the word, in such a way that it leads us to further the honour and welfare of every country, so that there will be fewer people who are poor, fewer who are ignorant, and fewer without faith, fewer despairing, fewer wars, less insecurity, more charity and more peace.