The Anniversary of the Establishment of the Prelature – Nov. 28th

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.

“Blessed be God the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” says St. Paul to the Ephesians, “who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.”

Today is a day of thanksgiving in the Prelature, because it's the anniversary of the establishment of Opus Dei as a Personal Prelature by Pope St. John Paul II. This marked the culmination of a very long and tortuous juridical pathway that God wanted for our supernatural family, that pathway which was intimately tied up with the life of our Father.

There are many things to be learned from this juridical pathway, partly responsible for the holiness of our Father. There is a big book called The Canonical Path of Opus Dei, which is a really good book to try and read at some stage in the course of your life. It reveals many things.

Of course, the whole of that juridical pathway is now public knowledge for our edification, and also for our appreciation of what our Father did over all those years. The one thing he lived for was that juridical solution, because he knew as a lawyer that unless that juridical solution was carved in stone in the law of the Church, anything could happen over time.

He made that a very central intention of his life; what was called at the time the “special intention.” He died eventually without having seen that fulfilled, because it was the will of God that Don Álvaro would finish off that juridical pathway in a very special way.

And so, today is a day of thanksgiving. As little children with a new maturity, we try to come to realize what that juridical pathway means, what the Prelature means in the history of the Church and in the history of the world.

We're not just a few people, as our Father liked to say, who have decided to do something good. We are fulfilling an imperative command of Christ, a very special task that God has wanted for us.

In the early days of the Work, our Father liked to point out how, to be holy, people went away from society. There were the early hermits; they became monks in the fifth century or so, and earlier. Then in the 11th or 12th century, there were the mendicant friars that went a bit more out into the world: they taught, they ran parishes, they did different things.

In the 16th century, the Church took another step out into the world with the religious orders. After the Council of Trent, there was a great flourishing of religious orders all over the world, which are going to be the backbone of the Church for the next three or four centuries. Many of us grew up educated by those religious orders.

But then our Father said it's as though on the 2nd of October 1928, God played His trump card. The Church steps out one step further out into the world, and it's not just monks or friars or priests or nuns that are called to be holy. Every person is called to be holy.

This gets expressed in the Second Vatican Council, and also in all the statutes and spirit of the Prelature of Opus Dei. As we look to the coming centuries, where we are now in the vanguard of this battle—the evangelization of society, of culture, a new evangelization—on which so many great things depend.

When the Father, in his latest letter, is preparing us for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Work, 1928 to 2028, only eight years away, he's inviting us to dream. A dream like our Father did in the early years of the Work. A dream about overcoming all the obstacles like our Father did.

Inter medium montium pertransibunt aquae. The waters will pass through the mountains. All difficulties will be overcome.

But God wants us to live and to work with faith, with hope, with trust, with abandonment, living out our divine filiation. And God will work all the miracles. Even if the task of the evangelization of society may seem impossible, those are the same sentiments that our Father had in the early 1930s.

He said to our first sisters, when there was one center in Madrid, as he painted the marvelous picture of the expansion of the Work, he said to them, “You can have two reactions. One is to say it's impossible, it’s impossible; and the other, to launch out into the deep with faith and trust in God.” He said, “I hope your reaction will be the second.”

Now the Work has spread all over the world. We are the inheritors of this great legacy.

Today's feast day is a special day in the course of the year that invites us to stir up those memories in order to make resolutions for the future: resolutions to grow, to conquer our pride and selfishness; resolutions of a greater self-giving like our Father had; resolutions of not wanting to be the center of attention; to give ourselves to others a little more; to fulfill the norms better, with more love of God; to have a proselytistic fidelity—so that while we look back over the last ninety or so years and see all that has been accomplished, we also realize that this is nothing compared to what God wants us to do in the future.

Don Álvaro talked a lot about the new flourishing of the Church in the world, and John Paul II talked in similar terms.

The Second Vatican Council has placed the building blocks for that new flourishing and the Prelature of Opus Dei is one of those building blocks. That spirit has been entrusted to us.

With great reason, Don Javier used to say ‘the Work is now in our hands.’ So many difficulties had to be overcome before the definitive juridical solution became a reality.

We shouldn't be surprised if we find that all these things take time also. Little by little we have to go through all of these things: difficulties that have to be overcome, problems that have to be solved, all sorts of things that have to happen.

Our role is to put one foot in front of the other. To persevere in the struggle. To think of the aspiration that our Father gave us of vale la pena, it's worth the effort. Begin again with a new fortitude.

The difficulties that our Father encountered along that juridical pathway were a journey to holiness. They were divine calls.

All the challenges that we might experience in the same way in relation to the development and expansion of the Work, horizontally or vertically in society, were also a divine call to that goal of our vocation. The difficulties make us grow in humility and in divine filiation.

We are aware of the acts of the devil to stop that going through. There were many moments when the devil acted in very definite ways. Our Father was very conscious of that throughout our juridical history. He made us very aware of it. The devil did not want Opus Dei to go forward.

Our Father also talked about the reality of providential injustices that he had to experience. It's a useful little adjective. We might experience injustice in some way or another in our work, in our marriage, in our family. Our Father helps us to put that adjective “providential” before it.

After his ordination, shortly before he left Zaragoza, there was a providential injustice that led him to Madrid. It was in Madrid that God wanted Opus Dei to be born. God used that injustice to change the path in the course of his life, because He had greater plans.

From 1951 onwards, our Father had greater recourse to Our Lady with the aspiration Cor Mariae dulcissimum, iter para tutum, Most Sweet Heart of Mary, make the way safe!

All the time that aspiration referred to the juridical solution, so that in the course of his life, he might be able to fulfill the mission that God had given to him and see it completed, which he was now able to do in heaven.

Don Álvaro said, after the establishment of the Prelature, that what God has done ‘is worthy of us to be prostrate before God for the rest of our lives.’ He resolved to lead a lifetime of thanksgiving.

When Don Álvaro came to Manila in 1987, I was talking to him at one stage and telling him little anecdotes. Each time I told him something, he would say, “Gracias a Dios, gracias a Dios, thanks be to God.”

You could really sense that this business of leading a lifetime of thanksgiving was not just a nebulous idea. It was something he was putting into practice in a very concrete way. He invited us to sing a sort of a permanent Te Deum, praising God and thanking Him for this wonderful thing.

It's now our grace to, little by little, come and try to understand those words—the meaning and the significance of the establishment of the Prelature—and to make new resolutions of fidelity, so that in the Work, as our Father taught us, we always live in the times of our Father.

We've heard the anecdote of how one time somebody mentioned to Don Álvaro: “That's how things were done in the times of our Father.” Don Álvaro immediately said, “Please don't use that phrase, ‘in the times of our Father,’ as though it's something past that we can forget about.”

He said, “We will always be living in the times of our Father.” Those times have to always be relevant to us; have something to say to us.

Every step of that juridical pathway has formative points for us—things to learn—so that we understand the length and the breadth of the Prelature. We understand a little better the figure of our Father: who he was, what he did, the role of Don Álvaro.

Even though decades have already passed since that establishment, we're still learning. One of the goals, Don Javier liked to say, for these decades, the early part of the 21st century, is a deeper understanding of the juridical configuration of the Prelature in the Church by people of the Church.

Happily, nowadays people are getting more used to and more accustomed to say the words Personal Prelature, but that wasn't the case thirty or forty years ago.

We have to continue on that pathway, and also be able to explain the Prelature. We don't have to go into in-depth canonical explanations, but we do have to have a couple of simple phrases when people ask us, What is a Personal Prelature?

In gratitude to our Father for what he has given to us, we owe it to him that we have a few clear phrases up our sleeve. ‘It's a relatively new jurisdiction in the Church of universal scope with its head in Rome. It gives formation to people, specifically helping them to sanctify their work into apostolate.’

Even if we say one sentence like that, that's usually enough for most people. They don't need something too profound, but we do need to have those words ready at every moment.

But at the same time, we continue to read, to study, to know a little bit more about this juridical configuration so that we see its beauty, its depth, so that we come to understand all the steps that our Father had to take, along with Don Álvaro, to make this new configuration crystal clear in the history of the Church.

Our Father did not just found Opus Dei—he gave rise to a whole new juridical entity. Just like the entity of religious orders in the 16th century flourished in hundreds and hundreds of religious orders all over the world that became the backbone, and so in the coming centuries, there might be hundreds of Personal Prelatures.

It’s a whole new reality for the Church, and hence, it’s very important for us to understand a little bit about this history, about what it means, about all the instruments that God used to bring it about.

Our Father liked to say, and Don Álvaro, that God has done everything. We owe it to Him. We've just been useless instruments. And so, a new humility.

This feast day can lead us to be a little bit more united to the Father, to take his recent letter and go through it, syllable by syllable. All the letters that come to us from the Father have a profound importance for our spiritual life and our formation, and we need to go back and read them again and again.

Also the early letters of our Father, of Don Álvaro, of Don Javier—they all have something to say to us. Retreat by retreat, annual course by annual course, we can't read these letters too much.

Or if you live close to a center, try and make it your regular spiritual reading, so that we spend ourselves to be good children that our Father wanted us to be, with what he says, “a minimum of juridical mentality,” so that little children before a great gift, they stand in awe and amazement of the wonderful things that God has given to them, and know how to raise their heart and soul in thanksgiving, to make resolutions to give everything.

Our Mass these days can be a Mass of special thanksgiving as we ask God for the grace to grow in all of these areas. Our Father says in The Forge: “My Lord, you always come to meet our real needs.”

An awful lot of the points of The Forge and the Furrow were inscribed in the soul of our Father through that juridical pathway—his experiences. "Give thanks,” he says, “often to Jesus for through Him, with Him, and in Him you are able to call yourself a child of God.” Throughout this pathway our Father felt himself led by the hand to the different stages.

One time in Rome, Don Álvaro told us near the end of that juridical pathway that he was with Pope John Paul II, who had mentally approved the canonical structure which was the exact structure, letter for letter, that our Father had left written. Our Father left three juridical solutions. If the first one wasn't approved, then we promote the second one. If not the second one, then we promote the third.

But the one that Pope John Paul II approved was the first one, and all the difficulties and contradictions around that time led John Paul II, the vicar of Christ on earth, now canonized, to study personally, word for word, everything that our Father had left written. It wasn't some third secretary down the corridor.

Don Álvaro liked to point out that all the contradictions had led to that great grace. When Pope John Paul finished reading everything that our Father had left written, he banged the table, he said, with his big fist and said, “This has to go through.”

Then at a later moment, Pope John Paul said to Don Álvaro when they were talking one time: “When do you want me to sign the papers?”

See the confidence with which the Holy Father dealt with Don Álvaro. And Don Álvaro told us, “I told him, ‘Holy Father, whenever you want.’”

Then he explained to us: ‘I told him that, because we want the juridical solution to come whenever God wants, not when we want.’ It was another very supernatural lesson that Don Álvaro taught us, in wanting the will of God in everything.

You see, Don Álvaro could have said to the Holy Father, “Well, Holy Father, you know I have 75,000 children all over the world who are offering their Mass every day for the last number of years and decades, and offering their lives, and their mortifications, and their prayer and work, and so many other things for this intention. Our Father died without it being fulfilled. So if you wouldn't mind here's a pen. Could you go and sign those papers right now……”

But Don Álvaro didn't say that. He said, “Holy Father, we want it whenever you want.”

We can learn from all these great lessons that our Father and Don Álvaro teach us, to love the will of God at all moments, in all the ways that it comes to us. The juridical pathway speaks to us of heroic sanctity in all sorts of ways.

In The Forge, our Father also says, “Thank you, Lord, because—as well as allowing us to be tempted—you also give us the strength and beauty of your grace so that we can win through! Thank you, Lord, for the temptations you allow us to have so that we may be humble!”

Just after the granting of the special intention. Don Álvaro wrote a long letter, the November 1982 letter, which is a very good letter to go and read some time. He talks all about thanksgiving for this great event.

At one point in that letter, in number 56, he says: “My children, we've been looking at the many reasons we have to be grateful and to persevere in continuous thanksgiving. As we did so, we will have seen all this ceaseless divine activity in our Father's soul and in the Work is expressed and summed up in a work of sanctification.”

“Ceaseless divine activity.” God is present in His work with each one of us, bringing about Opus Dei, bringing it forward in every nook and corner and cranny of society. God has arranged all these things to teach us to be His intimate friends and to sanctify us. All these things.

Lord, give me the grace to correspond more to my vocation, to have that supernatural outlook that our Father had, to love my vocation and love the Work, and protect it, and serve it in all the ways that you want me to serve it.

“Meditate on the fact,” he says, “that the work of sanctification is a tribute to the Holy Spirit. It is He who has really been our guide. It was the divine spirit who showered upon our Founder and the Work this abundance of operative graces which are now in our hands.”

He’s saying that deep in the soul of our Father, the Holy Spirit was super-active. During all of those years, all of those trials, all of those difficulties—all the time the Holy Spirit was leading our Father forward, as He leads each one of us forward, as He wants to be active in the souls of each one of us, and through that divine grace that we receive through the sacraments.

“This is why,” he continues, “I see clearly that our gratitude to God for what we have received must be expressed in the determination to get to know the Holy Spirit better, to converse with Him and love Him. We must all set out even more urgently upon truly spiritual pathways, upon ways of intense interior life that enable us to discover within our souls the indwelling and powerful action of the Holy Spirit.”

A good prayer in our prayer today, a good petition to ask of Our Lord, would be those truly spiritual pathways. Holy Spirit, lead me along those deeper spiritual pathways where I find my joy and my peace and my serenity, the purpose of my life, so that from that overflow, I can effect more apostolate in the environment around me.

“From there,” he says, “we must stride out at a pace of confident love, of friendship, and with total receptiveness to God's action.” In these words, it's as though Don Álvaro is describing the whole life of our Father in and through and along that juridical pathway which in some ways was never ending, although today we celebrate the end.

When this establishment was announced in 1982, Don Álvaro decreed three days of thanksgiving in the whole of our supernatural family. Three days of thanksgiving to God for this great intention for which our Father had prayed so much.

During that time Don Álvaro liked to say that somebody lent him a calculator one day and he began to calculate all the different things that were being offered for this intention: all the Masses by people of the Work all over the world; the mortifications; many deaths; many sicknesses; many cancers. He began to calculate all this on the calculator. And sometimes the figure would hardly even fit on the screen.

He remarked, “If God is demanding so much prayer for this intention to be granted, it must be for an enormous good for the universal Church.”

We can get great holy pride and joy in that, of how we are part of something that is serving the Church in such a clear way, doing great things over time.

“This readiness,” he continues, “to respond to divine plans is a specific characteristic of souls who converse with the Holy Spirit. The great stranger must be for us the great friend. With Him we will make the paths of the earth divine.”

Just like the Holy Spirit was active in the soul of our Father, so He'll be active in the soul of each one of us in spite of our miseries and weaknesses and contradictions and failures. He's bringing about His great work on earth in us and through us. We can have great trust and confidence in that.

“To accomplish this,” he says, “I advise you to go frequently to Our Lady and St. Joseph—great friends of the Trinity who knew best how to second the inspirations of the sanctifying spirit and to most perfectly follow the way God wanted you to.”

We’re about to accompany the Holy Family very closely along their journey to Bethlehem, a very good time for us to turn more frequently to them so that they might lead us to the Trinity. And also, that we learn from them how to listen a little better to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit deep in our soul; that we know He's there always.

After the granting of the special intention, Don Álvaro said that famous aspiration of our Father—Cor Mariae dulcissimum, iter para tutum! Prepare a safe way!—now we can change that slightly and say, Cor Mariae dulcissimum, iter para et serva tutum! Most sweet heart of Mary, keep the way safe!

It has a great application in our life, to keep the pathway of our vocations, of our apostolate, of our marriage, of our family, of our work, of all the plans that God has for our life. And so, with reason, united to the Father, as we look to the 2nd of October 1928 with the help of this letter, we can say with great fervor to Our Lady today, Cor Mariae dulcissimum, iter para et serva tutum!

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.

GD