The Anniversary of the Election of Don Fernando Ocáriz as the Prelate of Opus Dei

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“I am the Good Shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for my sheep” (John 10:14-15).

We are celebrating the anniversary of the election of the Prelate and his appointment by the Holy Father.

It's a special moment in the liturgical year, a special moment in the history of our supernatural family, when we see how God has chosen this particular person to succeed our Father, Blessed Álvaro, Don Javier, and to bring the whole of Opus Dei forward in this next period of our history, which the Father has liked to remind us is a period of preparation for 2028, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Work.

He has written a very special letter to help us over these years to prepare for that very special occasion.

The anniversary of the election of the Prelate is a moment for us to look back and thank God for so many things in these last years, and also in the last years of the previous Prelates, as we look forward to continuing the great legacy that we have been given.

In a letter in 1995, just after he was elected, Don Javier said, “God called Don Álvaro to his presence and put at the head of Opus Dei this Father of yours, who is now writing to you.”

You get the message from the words of Don Javier of the great burden that has now been placed on his shoulders.

I remember in a get-together in Rome one time, Don Álvaro, speaking very seriously said, “Pray very much for the person who succeeds me and those who come after, because the weight of the Work,” he said, “is very heavy.”

From the words of Don Javier, you get a little bit of that impression, the great responsibility that's now on his shoulders.

We have to help the Father to carry that burden, to carry that weight. It's part of our vocation. It's a responsibility for each one of us.

Every day we're encouraged to pray for the Father and to offer things for his intentions.

In a concrete way, we're left to our own initiative, but it could be very good to remember him, perhaps in our visit to the Blessed Sacrament, in our morning offering, in our Mass, in our Rosary, and in the various hours of work that make up our day.

“In this way,” continued Don Javier, “he opened a new page in the history of the Work. As I've already said on other occasions, it's a new page, a new chapter, not a new stage, for we remain at the stage where it began twenty years ago.”

Don Javier was referring to the stage of continuity. We are the continuity. It's our role to help the spirit of the Work to be transmitted to those who come after us. We've been entrusted with the treasure. We have to look after that treasure.

We should walk along the pathway of our vocation with all of its details, challenges, and beauties, so that we can be a shining example for those who come after us of what it means to live out our vocation to Opus Dei in the middle of the world.

It's a new page, a new chapter, but not a new stage, for “we remain at the stage where it began twenty years ago.” There can be no other stage than that of continuity and fidelity. Notice how Don Javier talks about continuity, but he also talks about fidelity.

It's continuity, but there’s no change. The spirit of the Work has been carved in stone. Everything has to be kept as our Father left it because that's the way God wants it to be. Together with the word ‘continuity’ there is fidelity.

He's sort of saying in a subliminal way that part of his role is to ensure that fidelity. He guides and directs the whole of Opus Dei, the men and women of the Prelature in the middle of the world, to live as our Father laid down that we should live all the different aspects of our spirit.

“But,” he says, “the page is new, my daughters and sons, because it remains to be written.’

The Father opens up great horizons. The future depends on our initiative and our goals, and our desires for holiness and apostolate, and our desires to be faithful to our Father, and our love of our vocation, and our unity to the Prelate on so many things. “It remains to be written.”

Each one of us has to ask: in this coming period, when Don Fernando is the Father, what is God asking of me very particularly in my place, in my center, in my apostolic activities, in my home, in my marriage, in my own personal sanctity, so that I write this page and I write it with all the heroism that the people who have gone before me have written their pages?

“You and I,” he says, “must write with our own lives, truly dedicated to the love of Jesus Christ.”

On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Work in 1978, 2nd of October, in a get-together in Rome, Blessed Álvaro told us that sometimes there are children who sit around in a circle and they play a game. They whisper a word into the ear of the person beside them, and that word has to be whispered into the ear of the next person.

The word is passed around the circle, and the joke is to see what word comes out at the other end of the circle. Usually, it's something completely different from what went in.

He said that can't happen with the spirit of Opus Dei. “What our Father put in, we have to pass on in all of its integrity, so that many centuries from now, people receive that spirit as our Father gave it out. We have to try and write this page with our own lives.”

Part of that means being very focused on that person that God has chosen to be at the head of our supernatural family, so that we support him with our prayer, with our mortification, with our fidelity.

“I think these lines,” he says, “will help you to have a better understanding of the importance of that truth I've repeatedly brought to your attention from the very day of my election and appointment as Prelate: the Work is in our hands.”

You see Don Javier referring to “the very first day of my election.”

God has chosen several days, several months, and several years to have this particular person as our good shepherd. He's going to have to give an account for all of those hours and days. And our Father used to say that we will also have to give an account of how we have helped and supported the Father.

So, we come face to face with this reality: “the Work is in our hands.”

Don Fernando, when he was elected, liked to point out how the sort of era of the beginnings ended with the death of Don Javier, those people who lived so close to our Father: Blessed Álvaro, Don Javier.

Now we're sort of at a different stage.

“Everything I've written until now,” he says, “comes down to this. Even at the opening of the elective general congress, while celebrating the Mass of the Holy Spirit as Vicar General of the Prelature, I said to the electors: now more than ever, the Work is truly in our hands.

“I want this to be the governing principle of my interior response and my pastoral and paternal responsibilities. What I would like and what I ask Our Lord for, through the intercession of our Father and Don Álvaro, is that it should govern your response as well.”

On these occasions, we also look back and see how well our Father organized everything. He left written down how his successors were to be elected.

There are electors of the women of the Prelature, and there are electors of the men of the Prelature. The women of the Prelature vote first, and then the result of their vote is made known to the men of the Prelature.

I've heard that their votes are read out one by one. And so, of the—whatever it is—100 or 80 or so electors, you have to listen one by one to the voice of the women of the Prelature. It shows you how powerful women are in Opus Dei. I heard an elector saying once that it has a huge impact.

Our Father, ahead of his time, left these things very clear, how things were to be done in our supernatural family. It's a model for the Universal Church as she moves forward.

Don Javier is saying here that he spoke in a special way to the electors. Each time that the electors meet for a general congress—there can be general congresses and there can be elective general congresses—but each time they meet, we can invoke the Holy Spirit very much so that He would be very active in their minds and hearts and souls.

Our Father also made the electors a very international body. I think at the last election, there were people from, maybe, fifty different countries.

Very often when the Work started in a country, as soon as possible, our Father appointed some electors. It reflects the universal and international nature of the Prelature, which is another beautiful aspect of our supernatural family.

“However,” he says, “we can never forget that the Work is above all in God's hands. Opus Dei is his.”

Whenever our Father talked about the Work, he never talked about ‘my Opus Dei,’ or of ‘what I have done.’ He talked about himself as belonging to this supernatural family, very much as a gift of God to which he had a vocation. He was always very clear that the Work belongs to God.

That can help us also to be very supernatural in everything relating to our vocation, to approach it, and the government of the Work, and the indications that we have received, in a very supernatural way.

Our Father says in The Way, “If you ever lose the supernatural meaning of your life, then you lose everything” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, cf. Point 280).

Everything in our family is very supernatural. We have to take care of that.

“In a word,” he says, “while it's true that the Work is in our hands, it doesn't thereby cease to be in God's hands. The Work continues to be completely Dei, of God.”

This fills us with hope because we know, with our divine filiation, therefore we can rely on God for everything. He's beside us all the time. He's bringing the Work forward, even at times when it might seem that the opposite is taking place: it's just an optical illusion.

God is with His Work, bringing it forward all over the world—helping the seeds that we sow with our apostolate, with this club, with that conference center, with this circle, with that talk, with this recollection, helping all of these things to go forward.

He says, “We're not alone in carrying out the Work. We don't count on our poor strength alone, but on God's strength and power, which has not been curtailed.”

He likes to quote Scripture: non est abbreviata manus Domini (Isa. 59:1), the hand of the Lord has not been stayed, has not been held back.

That means that if God permits some cross in our life, some challenge, some difficulty, something that we weren't expecting, something we thought would never happen to us—but somehow it has come along—then that's God's plan for our holiness.

That's a means to our apostolic fruitfulness. It's in and through that means that God wants us to walk along the pathway of our vocation.

And it's from the offering of that particular cross that we can, in particular, help the Father to carry the weight of this, to carry it on a daily basis.

He says, “This is the reason for our optimism, despite our personal weaknesses and despite all the difficulties we may encounter. It also sharpens our sense of responsibility. Opus Dei is in our hands. God has given us this treasure so that we can make it bear fruit, first and foremost, through our own personal conversion, through our deeper desires for personal holiness.”

If the Father were to ask each one of us personally what we're going to give him on this particular anniversary, he might ask us for that: a deeper desire for personal holiness, a deeper desire to launch out into the deep in relation to friendship, which is like the buzzword that he's been speaking about in the last few months and years.

“Opus Dei is in our hands” for us to carry it out with God and in the way that God wants, not according to our whims or our own experience and understanding.

We might have little ways of doing things that have developed over time that might not be fully in keeping with our spirit: ways of talking, ways of acting, ways of thinking. Little by little over time, we have to try and correct those ways to be a little bit more Opus Dei.

This is the purpose of our formation, of the chat, of our recollection, of our retreat, of our annual course, of fraternal correction, of all the means we have. And we know that our formation never finishes. We will need to be going to Confession, attending our circle, and making our chat until our dying day.

I heard of somebody once who was dying of cancer. While it was possible that they were going to die on a certain day of this particular week, and their chat was scheduled for Thursday, they asked that they might bring their chat forward—do it on Monday or Tuesday—so that they would go to heaven with their chat done.

Well, that's living our spirit right to the very end. And that's what happened.

“This conviction,” he says, “leads us to spare no effort in our work, never losing sight of what God asked from our Founder, or of our Father's faithful response to God's action.”

We also have to help the Father to fulfill all these great goals and to live up to the great examples that he's been given by his predecessors, and help him in every way we can with our affection, with our prayer, writing to him, telling him about our apostolic endeavors.

“During the foundational stage,” said Don Javier, “the weight of the Work rested on the Founder.”

Don Álvaro's prayer has become famous among us: “Lord, I ask you for whatever the Father is asking you.” Many times, Don Álvaro commented to people that often his whole prayer was that. Whatever our Father was asking in his prayer, “that's what I want to ask you for also.”

He says it summarizes very well our attitude during those blessed years, lived happily alongside our Father. “Our Founder led the Work, and we followed him with our personal struggle, perhaps with ups and downs, but with an eagerness to learn.”

It’s interesting that he uses those words: “our Founder led the Work.” One of the roles of the Father is to lead the Work. The Father represents Opus Dei. The Regional Vicar represents Opus Dei in each country as a representative of the Father.

We don't represent Opus Dei. We don't lead Opus Dei. But the Father's role is to lead. Sometimes leading can be difficult and can bring its own challenges. That's why he needs our encouragement, our affection, and our fidelity.

“How profoundly Don Álvaro explained this in a meditation back in the 1950s,” he says. “On that occasion, he told us a bit about the cross that our Founder was carrying, united to Christ, as he brought the Work forward.”

I've heard Don Fernando in a meditation saying that “the expansion of the Work goes forward on and from the cross.” Interesting words. We want to bring the Work forward in our environment, in our workplace, in our city, in some satellite city that we travel to.

We have to remember that it's the cross that's going to bring it forward. So, we shouldn't be surprised when the cross comes. The cross is a blessing. God blesses us with the cross. We can thank Him for those difficulties or those contradictions.

He proposed that through our dedicated lives, we should all be Simon of Cyrene, helping our Father to keep that cross aloft.

Later, when the stage of continuity began, Don Álvaro safeguarded the Work's path and fastened us all to the unbreakable link he formed as our Father's most faithful son.

There's a moment in the homily, Time is a Treasure, in Friends of God, where our Father says, “We must not squander this period of the world's history that God has entrusted to each one of us” (Point 39).

Rather haunting words, and you could say the same things about this period of the Work's history—the history of the Work in your town, in your village, in your country, in your profession that has been entrusted to us at this particular moment.

These years of preparation for the 100th anniversary are when we can look back with gratitude and pride, and see how the seeds our Father planted have spread all over the world.

I was told that at the ceremony of the beatification of our Father in 1992, Uncle James, Tio Santiago, was asked if there was anything in particular that day that had struck him in a special way—anything in the ceremony of the Pope or people in St. Peter's Square or a whole pile of other things.

And curiously, he said, “Yes, there was something that struck me very particularly. It wasn't just the ceremony or the words of the Pope or claiming my brother was Blessed. In some ways, we all knew that.

“But,” he said, “I was introduced to an Assistant Numerary from Fiji, and I was thinking that if the spirit that my brother founded in Madrid was able to spread to the islands in the South Pacific, and this girl had been led by the Holy Spirit to dedicate her life to God in Opus Dei, to that spirit that my brother founded, that can only be from God. You cannot explain that in human terms.”

Many other people have made similar observations throughout history. They have come to see in various ways that the Work must be from God.

And that all helps us to have a great faith in what we're doing, a great faith in our Father, a great faith in the organs of government, so that we live like little children. “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matt. 18:3).

We're called to be little children with faith, with divine affiliation, with humility, to allow our Father to take us by the hand and lead us forward so that we follow the example of those who have gone before us.

He says, “Now with the culmination of the Work's juridical path and our Father's beatification, and with our beloved Don Álvaro called to his presence, we find ourselves very firmly placed on the front line.”

This is a sentiment our Father liked to say. We are very much “on the front line”—on the front line of the battle, on the front line of the apostolate of the Work and of the Church in the world, the front line of the sanctification of the temporal realities, of the vocation of every layperson in the middle of the world.

And possibly in our town, in our city, in our country, we've been placed on the front line in other ways.

“Don Álvaro's words,” he says after his election, “ring out clear and strong: We have come to the end of the foundational years, during which the Father was able to polish, to carve in stone our spirit and the way beyond as a family, because he was endowed with God's specific graces—foundational graces—which none of his successors will ever possess.”

Whenever you hear of how our Father carved our spirit in stone, it can lead us to think of the statue of our Father that's now carved in stone in the walls of St. Peter's. That idea of being carved in stone literally has become a reality. With our Father being carved in stone, the whole spirit of Opus Dei has been carved in stone.

“Instead,” he says, “they will be given graces, abundant graces, to preserve and defend the spirit of the Work and to pass it on whole and entire, but only for that purpose.”

At this period of the Work's history, we've been called to support this particular Father, to use this anniversary to think of him a little more, to pray for him a little more.

“Those of us from the third generation, ‘from the sixth and ninth hour,’ to return to the Gospel parable (Matt. 20:5),” he says, “receive the Work already complete, as a precious legacy from our Father, through the first generations of his children.

“The Work is now in our hands. And it is, I stress, complete with its full ecclesial and spiritual identity. We have received the whole reality.”

A priest in Rome once told us that we're a bit like people who have come in late into a cinema and have gotten the front seats in the cinema to get the best view of what's going to take place on the stage, on the theatre, or on the screen.

Whereas many others have been waiting, putting up with the heat of the day or the hours, waiting for the show to start, you sort of come in at the last moment, sat in the front places, got the best view, and here we are.

An awful lot of the work has been done. We have to try and go forward and live with the spirit that our Father started everything.

“This also means,” he says, “that there's nothing left for us to invent. Our part now, always in close union with our directors, is to defend the Work's identity and protect it from becoming watered down.”

We're not here to invent new things, as our Father left everything carved out as God wanted it to be.

Our job now is to absorb that spirit of our Father, reading and re-reading his words, his ideas, his letters, living out our unity to the Father, offering everything for him, thanking God for all the things that our Father laid down in elective congresses and all the other ways of the continuity of our family, which can last until the end of time. It was revealed to our Father that the Work would be there at the end of time.

He says, “We must get to know it very well, to study its spirit and apostolic ways, so as to apply them wisely in different cultural and social circumstances Divine Providence disposes along our way.”

Don Álvaro once said publicly that every time he went to Confession, he would accuse himself of all the times when he might not have been as docile or as humble or as united to our Father as he might have been; or when he might not have given him the service that he could have given with attention, with affection, with support.

It was a very interesting detail of his own spiritual life that he wanted to share with other people—a great refinement of spirit.

We could try and learn from that refinement of the spirit of Don Álvaro how better, also, to be better children of the present Father and united to him.

“All of you,” he said, “share this responsibility with me. As our Father used to say, and as I reminded the electors when the congress began, the Work will always be a minor. She will always need the love and protection of all her daughters and sons.

“Nevertheless, I never forget that this is above all a grave responsibility of mine, inherent to my office as Father and shepherd, for which I will have to give an account to God.

“But I also know I can count on help from God who sustains me, I'm sure of it, through the intercession of our Father, who continues to direct the Work from heaven. For, as Don Álvaro said, in Opus Dei, the Prelature is only our Father's shadow.

“I also rely on your prayers. I count on this treasure of your prayers, and I thank you for them with all my heart.”

We can ask Our Lady, Queen of Opus Dei, to take care of the Father and all the other Fathers that have to come in the course of time, that she might be beside him, helping him to be that good shepherd that God wants him to be.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JM