part0009

hey scoured Rome for a house. Not just any old house: they did not want a hut, or a palace, or a mansion, or a barracks, or a hotel, or an office block. It had to be a home for the head of a family, a very large family. It was to be the permanent headquarters of Opus Dei, a dignified place with plenty of room and with the potential for further building, since in the future men and women from all over the world would come to live there, to study and be formed in the spirit of the Work.

In an antique shop in Piazza di Spagna Father Escrivá and Don Alvaro spotted a beautiful Baroque wooden statue of the Madonna . It was very cheap—8,000 lire, or about six dollars. Thinking ahead to the new house, it was a bargain they did not want to miss. But it took them more than a month to scrape together enough money. 1

Father Escrivá did not have an open-handed patron behind him. At that moment vocations to the Work in Italy could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Spain the Work had been established in Madrid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Valencia, Bilbao, Granada, Valladolid, and Santiago. However, the young women who lived in Los Rosales, besides studying, had to rear chickens and grow vegetables to feed themselves. The men in Molinoviejo likewise combined their studies with building an extension and setting up a small farm. Recently graduated architects, engineers, physicists, lawyers, and mathematicians were not above battling with hens, pigs, or cows. They swept up coal dust, mixed it with plaster, and used it to feed the boiler for the central heating. In the kitchen they invented some sophisticated hamburgers—made of rice, cooked and mashed. These ways of making do were a true picture of the finances of Opus Dei in those early years.

Postwar Italy was an aristocratic republic where destitute but dignified princesses, dukes, counts, and marquises swarmed in the impoverished salons of what had been high society. Some were well up on news of houses to rent, small palaces being disposed of, furniture going to auction, tapestries, lamps, and pictures for sale, privately and discreetly, by people who did not want their new poverty to show.

One day the telephone rang in Città Leonina. Duchess Virginia Sforza-Cesarini was on the line. The person who answered the telephone, surprised, made gestures of inquiry to the others. No one knew her.

“I have been told you are looking for a villa, a residence,” she said. “Maybe I know one that would suit you. I would be delighted to invite you to tea in my house.”

Father Escrivá and Don Alvaro paid a visit. The Duchess Sforza-Cesarini was a charming, gracious lady, but the offer she made on behalf of a third party did not interest them. Among the disadvantages, the house was outside Rome. Father Escrivá used the visit to talk to the duchess about the love of God, a life of prayer, and the value of suffering. Then he explained Opus Dei to her, how the range of its apostolates would be throughout the world, and how this task had to be directed from the heart of the Church in Rome. 2

Virginia Sforza was impressed, and offered to help in their search for a house. A few days later she contacted them again: “I have seen something which I think you will find interesting.” It was a large villa, with a garden which could be built on, in the Parioli district of Rome. It belonged to another aristocrat, Count Gori Mazzoleni, who wanted to sell it and leave Italy. The house had been leased to the Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See, but diplomatic ties between the Hungarian Communist government and the Vatican State had been broken off. The owner wished to sell as soon as possible, without using agents.

Father Escrivá, Alvaro del Portillo, Salvador Canals, and a fourth person went to see the villa. It was on the corner of Viale Bruno Buozzi and Via di Villa Sacchetti. The garden reached as far as Via Domenico Cirillo. Count Gori Mazzoleni received them in the porter’s lodge where he was living, since the main house was still occupied by civil servants and employees of the Hungarian legation, who were staying there illegally (and would continue to do so for two more years). Father Escrivá liked the situation of the house, the extent of the land which could be built on, and the quattrocento Florentine style of the main building. He asked Don Alvaro to go ahead with arranging the purchase. As they had no money, they would buy the property by making a symbolic down payment, then get a mortgage and use it to pay off the count.

Don Alvaro, Salvador Canals, and a lawyer friend, Dr. Merlini, negotiated with the owner and came to an agreement. They achieved such a reduction in price that it almost seemed a gift. Two or three years later the property would be worth thirty or forty times as much. But even though it was a small amount, at the time they did not have the money. They resorted to asking everyone they knew for help. They managed to persuade the owner to formalize the sale without any money, giving him as a pledge a few gold coins that they had been keeping to make a sacred vessel with. Not wanting to lose these, they stipulated in the contract that the gold coins should be returned when they paid the total amount. They committed themselves to finalizing the deal within two months. Gori Mazzoleni’s only condition was for payment in Swiss francs. He was content to wait until the buyers got the money together. 3 When the contract was finally signed, in the early hours of the morning, Don Alvaro and Salvador Canals returned to the apartment in Città Leonina to find Father Escrivá waiting for them, on his knees praying in the oratory. 4

“He accepted the gold coins—and he’s giving us two months!” they said. “His only condition is that the payment must be made in Swiss francs.”

Father Escrivá started to laugh and shrugged his shoulders, surprised and amused. “We don’t care! We have neither lira nor francs, and one currency is the same as another for Our Lord.” 5 Later on, asking his daughters to pray for this matter, he said with a mischievous wink, “Mind you get the currency right: it has to be in Swiss francs.” 6

Payment had not yet Gori Mazzoleni met Encarnita Ortega and Concha Andres one day on the streets of Rome. He stopped his car and gave them a lift to Città Leonina. On the way he praised Don Alvaro to the skies: “To me, he’s not just an honest person with whom I’ve made a deal; he’s a loyal friend, a wise counselor, and an admirable priest.” 7

Sometime later, when the people of the Work had moved to the villa on Bruno Buozzi Street and were living in the lodge, the count went to visit them. He was taken into what had been his house, and, seeing the floor shining, asked Salvador Canals, “Have you changed the floor?”

“No, it’s the same one, but clean.” 8

The Count might have said the same later if he visited the main house: some of the walls had been washed, others had been covered in cloth, though not where big pictures were going to be hung, so as to save material. The people of the Work themselves did most of the decorating, painting ceilings, beams, and door frames. They were the same rooms but they had been thoroughly cleaned and artistically painted.

From July 1947 until February 1949 when the Hungarian “tenants” eventually left the villa, the people of the Work lived on the two floors of the lodge. Upstairs were the kitchen, laundry, and dining room; downstairs, the residence, “Il Pensionato .”

Few rooms and many people. Every square foot was used intensively. There was only one bed with legs and a mattress; at night, people unrolled bedrolls, as if they were camping. Later on, Father Escrivá would recall this strange, cramped way of living without dramatizing the situation and even humorously: “As we had no money, we did not turn on the heating. Neither did we have a place to sleep. We didn’t know where we would sleep at night—inside the hall door, in one corner or another. There was just one bed and we reserved it for whoever was ill. Like St. Alexis, we lived under the stairs.” 9

What he omitted was that as soon as anybody got a cold or was threatened with flu, Father Escrivá himself was always first to unroll a bedroll under the dining room table and would sleep there. If his sons plugged in an electric heater for him, he would turn it off because he did not want to be warm while his sons were cold.

During the day, everyone helped with the building and decorating; they also studied, went to classes at the pontifical universities and carried on apostolate with their university classmates. Soon Opus Dei spread to several Italian cities: Turin, Bari, Genoa, Milan, Naples, and Palermo.

In addition to the difficulties of paying for the property and food, there was the expense of the building alterations in progress. For the next few years they lived among scaffolding and pickaxes, as well as the comings and goings of foremen, bricklayers, carpenters, and plumbers. These workmen had to be paid every Saturday without fail, at 1:15 p.m.

Don Alvaro bore the brunt. He obtained credit, signed bills of exchange, and borrowed money. He himself told a little—not everything—of the difficulties in buying building materials and paying the workers. “The first time we managed to pay them without any problems as we had saved up a bit of money, but by the second time, we couldn’t. So we began to search all over Rome for people who would lend us the money we needed. One person did offer to help, but the next day he came back to say he would have to mortgage his property, which was a step out of all proportion to the amount we were asking for. So we had lost a day. Saturday was looming, and the workers had to be paid come what may.

“In the end we spoke to a lawyer called Merlini, a man with a beard which really suited him, a good, devout Catholic and a competent jurist. He had helped us to buy the house, and in many other negotiations. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘it so happens that I have some money left with me by a client, which he has given me the use of for a year.’ He lent it to us at no interest, and it was enough for two weeks’ wages. Then Our Lord saw to it that we should manage with bills of exchange and a certain amount of juggling. It was a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul: a kind of madness, and a source of great stress. How did we manage? It was a miracle. I don’t know how, but we always paid.” 10

One day Don Alvaro fell ill. He was running a temperature of forty degrees (104ºF). Father Escrivá came to his bedside and, seeing him so ill and worried because “Saturday, pay day, is coming up,” he asked, “Alvaro, my dear son, what will happen, what can happen if for once we don’t pay them, and let them wait until we have the money?”

“What can happen? I don’t mind going to prison. But it’s the honor of the Work that is at stake.”

“Well then, get yourself up and see if you can find the money, wherever.”

While awaiting Don Alvaro’s return, Father Escrivá, as he so often did, went to ask his daughters for an intense bombardment of prayers for this intention. He was deeply affected.

“What kind of a swine am I? I’m killing poor Alvaro. But we have no option: he’s the only one who can go to the banks and solve the problem, because they know and trust him. With just a little bit, only the tiniest bit of what he’s carrying on his shoulders, I’d have died by now.”

Then, to defuse the situation, he added playfully, “My son Alvaro’s illness would be cured instantly if we put a healthy poultice of liras, or better still, pounds sterling, on his liver.”

After a little while, Don Alvaro returned. Father Escrivá came out to meet him.

“Have you got it?”

“How did you get it?”

“As always Father, by obeying.” 11

In the end they found a construction company belonging to Leonardo Castelli. He studied the work already underway, as well as the plans of the projected buildings. He could see it was not just a makeshift job, but something that had to be done thoroughly, a project to last for centuries. He trusted Don Alvaro’s goodness and honesty, and decided to take over the contract. From then on Castelli would pay the workers’ wages. He even increased the number of workmen to speed up the job. Don Alvaro had to pay Castelli’s bill every two or three months. The cost was no less, but they had more time to find the money.

They all tightened their belts. They got up at the crack of dawn to walk to the universities so as to save the bus or streetcar fares. On these long walks they wore rope-soled sandals and carried their shoes in a bag so as not to wear the shoes out. On the way, one would read the day’s lesson aloud while the others memorized it to the rhythm of their own strides. A packet of twenty cigarettes, sliced with the precision born of long practice, was transformed into sixty mini-cigarettes.

As the villa was so big, it had seven entrances from the street. All but two were now closed off. Money was so tight they did not have enough to pay lo Zio Carlo, “Uncle Charles,” a carpenter from Città Leonina, to board up all the doors, so he did half of them and finished the job when they could pay. Meantime they stopped the drafts with newspapers and sacks.

About this time, March 1948, Father Escrivá suffered a facial paralysis as a result of the cold, but only three people knew about it. He only referred to it much later, saying in a conversation, “My face went like that too, about twenty years ago. There are three witnesses to it in Rome. But it was not a joke; it was because we had no money for heating and it was very damp indeed there.” 12

They had taken on a formidable construction project to house the offices and the living quarters of the general council and the central advisory of Opus Dei. Faculty and students of the Roman College of the Holy Cross, for men, also lived there for some years, as they did not move to Cavabianca until 1974; and for some time the students and faculty of the Roman College of Our Lady, for women, had to live there too, until they moved to Castelgandolfo in 1963. There also was quite a large domestic staff. In all, more than 300 people lived there.

One day, while walking through part of the house with one of his sons, a naval officer named Rafael Caamaño, Father Escrivá explained how many of the architectural or decorative features had been copied from other places seen while walking around Rome or traveling in Italy. “We were not trying to be innovative but to get the thing done well.” Then, laughing because some people might think the house had the airs of a great mansion, he added lightheartedly, “We have copied so many lovely things from here and there that everything has an ‘ancestry’ and a ‘genealogy.’ Besides, when you copy something you can improve on it, do it more cheaply and with fewer defects.” 13

Father Escrivá kept a close eye on the work, both at the planning stage and when it was being done. He often climbed up the scaffolding with the architects and the builders. Sometimes, on days when the men were not working, he took his daughters with him so that they too could enjoy imagining where things would be. It was not just his house but everybody’s—a big family house. On one of these visits he showed them a large crucifix hanging in the Galleria di Sotto. “I told the artist to do his very best to make a living, serene Christ, not one twisted in agony on the Cross,” he said. “I wanted people’s hearts to be moved to contrition just by contemplating it.”

Then he read the phrase he’d had engraved on a plaque beside it. They were Peter’s words when Jesus had asked him three times, “Peter, do you love me more than these?”

Domine, Tu omnia nosti, Tu scis quia amo te —“Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you.”

Father Escrivá continued looking at the crucifix. He whispered an irrepressible exclamation, “And how!” 14

They lived in discomfort, privation, and austerity, through the cold and damp of winter and the suffocating summer heat, often going hungry. Father Escrivá did not try to conceal the truth with euphemisms, and would say to his sons, “You can’t become easy-going here! Humanly speaking you have it tough, thank God! Although years ago it was much worse. I’ve told you so often that many of your brothers have been hungry with me: not for one or two days, but long spells. We did not have a cent.” 15

In time, no one would remember the hardship. They could only talk of Father Escrivá’s immense love, tender and firm at the same time, toward each of them, “calling us each by our own nicknames: Pepele, Pilé, Olly, Beto, Wally, Riny, Cipry, Babo, Quecco, and more, because a big and beautiful family is what we were and what we are.”

When there was a break in his work, Father Escrivá would often step into a small garden in front of Villa Vecchia and walk up and down while he said a part of the Rosary or chatted with a companion. He could not avoid the company of his children, and he did not want to. He would look toward the windows, open perhaps because of the heat. Everybody was busy studying or working. If he saw someone, he cleared his throat to attract attention and, if the person looked up, beckoned him to join him. Soon he would be surrounded by young men and would have a lively conversation, strolling from one side of the garden to the other. Other times he would sit in a corner at a central area called the Arco dei Venti, perhaps because there was a breeze there. He would talk to his sons about supernatural themes and give them the spirit of the Work, letting them drink it from its source while he forgot his tiredness and gave himself to them joyfully.

One afternoon in 1954 he was talking in this way when suddenly he lost the thread of what he was saying. Gazing at them one by one, he asked point-blank, “Do you know, my sons, why I love you so much?” A few seconds went by. The answer came with irresistible forcefulness: “I love you so much because I see the Blood of Christ bubbling through your veins.” 16

Financial problems persisted, a permanent feature of Father Escrivá’s life, although lack of money never stopped him from doing what the spread of Opus Dei demanded. He put into practice the old saying: “Spend all you ought, though you owe all you spend.” 17

Worry about ways and means did not destroy his peace of mind for a second. When money worries were at their peak, in October 1948, Father Escrivá directed a workshop for his daughters who held executive posts in the Work. They met in Los Rosales. They studied and worked intensely to get through a week’s program in three days. The agenda was very diverse, taking in subjects ranging from the spiritual formation of people of Opus Dei to the maintenance of the centers; from new apostolic initiatives to the need for physical rest.

When they came to a session called “Study of the Financial Situation,” the women supposed they would need to produce an analysis of ways to maintain apostolic projects. Folders, notebooks, records of experiences, estimates of expenses and incomes, extracts of domestic accounts, and more, were piled up on the table in the dining room, where sessions were held. But Father Escrivá said, “My daughters, financial questions are solved by personal responsibility and equally personal poverty. Rather than studying the matter here, it is something you each need to discuss in your prayer, face to face with our Lord.” That session took place in the evening, in the oratory of Los Rosales, in intense silence. 18

Father Escrivá believed financial problems had to be solved by making demands on oneself and having total trust in God. As part of his own dialogue with God, he wrote: “My financial situation is as tight as it ever has been. But I haven’t lost my peace of mind. I’m quite sure that God, my Father, will settle the whole business once and for all.” 19

He practiced the same personal poverty expected of his children. There are countless examples. Father Escrivá had just two cassocks. One, cut in the Roman style and always clean and well-ironed, was for going out and receiving visitors. The other was for wearing around the house. It had so many darns and patches that he said, “It has more embroidery than a Manila shawl.” 20

His bedroom was a small cubicle with a bed, a table, a plain wooden chair with no cushion, and a tiny built-in wardrobe. Everyone had to walk through it to get to other rooms. The room where he worked was the smallest, darkest room in Villa Tevere. Only through one tiny window, looking on to an interior patio, could a breath of air and a sliver of light get in.

He had a thorough-going determination to have no possessions, nothing of his own, not to complain if he lacked what he needed, and to do without anything superfluous. He also practiced poverty in his body and soul all the time.

One morning, before breakfast, Father Escrivá had gone with Don Alvaro to have a blood test in Via Nazionale. It was 11:30 before they were through. As they had to make a few calls elsewhere, it was not worth going home, so they went into a bar in Piazza Esedra for breakfast. Standing at the bar, they asked for a cappuccino and a bread roll. Don Alvaro paid. As they were about to drink the coffee, a beggar woman came in, went up to Father Escrivá, and asked him for money.

“I have no money. The only thing I have is this. Here you are, and God bless you!” He passed his untouched breakfast to her. Don Alvaro immediately tried to pass on his breakfast to Father Escrivá. “You have this, and I’ll get another one for myself.”

“No, no, leave it. I’ve had mine.”

Don Alvaro insisted. Father Escrivá refused to budge. The girl at the till joined in, “Father, you have your cappuccino, we’ll make another for this woman.” Father Escrivá, smiling but determined not to give in, closed the episode by saying, “No, no, thank you very much. Relax, I’ve had breakfast already.” He wanted to be poor because he wanted to be Christ. And because he wanted to be Christ, other people’s helplessness, suffering, and destitution struck at his conscience. He would have preferred to suffer himself.

The work on the house in Bruno Buozzi Street increased. They were still living in the lodge which they called Il Pensionato , “the boardinghouse.” Encouraged by the motto “God and Daring” of earlier years, Father Escrivá launched into the building of the Roman College of the Holy Cross. It was madness, a dream. But to commit himself further before God, he gave it the legal formality of a decree, signed on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, 1948. In the text he proclaimed that people from every country would come to the Roman College to receive spiritual, intellectual, and apostolic training. It would be a school where men were formed to be educators in their turn. It would be an “assault course,” a rigorous training ground for passing on to others the compelling news of an ideal that could enrich every aspect of their lives.

This mixing and sharing of young people from many nations would open up their horizons, ridding them of any provincial outlook, nationalism, or discrimination by race or class. In the Roman College they would acquire a perspective incompatible with any kind of arrogance: para servir, servir —“to be useful, serve.”

Repeatedly, Father Escrivá pointed out to men and women that they weren’t there to become “supermen” or “superwomen.” He told them they would always be “earthenware”: brittle clay, easily broken, but able to hold the fine liquor of wisdom.

In a corner of the villa visible from the Cortile Vecchio as well as from the Galleria della Campana, a white marble slab expressed this idea in sober Latin words. The inscription, dated 1952, was addressed to every visitor, resident, or guest. “Consider these buildings you see around you as the rigorous training ground from which a race of strong men and women will go out, who shall always fight joyfully and peacefully, throughout the world, for the Church of God and the Roman Pontiff.”

On saying good-bye to some who had finished their studies in the Roman College and were returning to their countries, Father Escrivá expressed what each of them felt: “If you have used your time well, Rome will leave a mark on your soul, a deep, lasting imprint. And you will be able to be more faithful sons of the Church.” 21

The Roman College of Our Lady for the women of the Work was established on December 12, 1953. The number of students grew so fast that by 1959 a proper college had to be built for them with all speed. Villa delle Rose was built outside Rome, at Castelgandolfo, on land which Pius XII had made over temporarily to the Work and which John XXIII donated permanently.

Villa delle Rose was finished in 1963. Now Father Escrivá launched the building of the campus for the Roman College of the Holy Cross, also on the outskirts of Rome near Via Flaminia: Cavabianca. He had no mania for building. The cause, rather, was the tide of vocations responding to the “universal call to holiness.”

Keener on finishing things than beginning them, he always refused to bless foundation stones. In the case of the building on Bruno Buozzi Street, he held a simple ceremony to bless the last stone of the group of buildings that made up Villa Tevere. It consisted of the sign of the Cross and recital of a Te Deum , followed by a cheerful “Auguri , everybody! Siamo arrivati !—we’re here!” It was January 9, 1960, and pouring rain. 22

The result of all this effort was a fine, large house, simple and unpretentious in style. What had been a large garden was now built over. More levels had been added, and several floors below ground level. The complex was neat and well balanced, by no means monumental or imposing. The classic Florentine style of the original “old house,” Villa Vecchia, had been maintained. The different levels meant lots of staircases, short bridges, and connecting corridors.

Literary invention came to the fore in choosing a name for every corner. The cortili , tiny inner courtyards, took their names from ornamental details: del Fiume, della Palla, dei Cantori, delle Tartarughe, del Cipresso —river, ball, singers, tortoises, and cypress. The ensemble was as varied as it was compact.

For those who lived in Villa Tevere, each place had its intimate history. Every stone held memories of Father Escrivá. “This is where the Father told me….” “How often the Father, standing in front of this image of Our Lady, would….” “When we painted the fresco on that wall, the Father helped….” Here was the background of his life, inseparably linked to the epic of the Work itself: a marble slab; bare footprints, showing the start of a route; the guardian angel of Opus Dei; the cheerful inscription Omnia in bonum telling the viewer that “everything is for the best.”

Altogether, Villa Tevere comprised eight houses. For the women, there were La Montagnola, Villa Sacchetti, La Casetta, Il Ridotto, and Il Fabbricato Piccolo. For men, there were the Casa del Vicolo, Uffici, and Villa Vecchia where Father Escrivá lived with the members of the general council.

On one occasion, referring to the fact there were only four dining rooms as against twenty-four oratories, Father Escrivá said, “That’s good; we pray more than we eat!” 23 The whole complex had a name which he had given it even before the scaffolding was raised: Villa Tevere (Tiber). He was thinking, perhaps, of the allegory of the old river Tiber which embraces Rome, surrounding her as if lovingly.

Sometimes, having gathered for a get-together in the evening, the men would start singing. Everyone sang, some better, some worse. They sang popular songs, songs full of genuine love. One of them might be borne through the windows to float on the warm air of the Roman night.