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xultavit ut gigas ad currendam viam . 1 “He was filled with joy and, like a giant, rose to run the course.” Father Josemaría Escrivá often used to repeat these words, emphasizing the rhythmic flow of the Latin. This rather strange verse from the Book of Psalms sometimes impelled him to find time where there was none, other times to fight still harder in his interior struggle, and still others, to give of himself wholeheartedly. He never realized that these six Latin words were a graphic description of his own life.

Great men, a very different species from mere “celebrities,” provide the biographer and the historian with an interesting problem. On the one hand, they are men of their time, well acquainted with the mentality, customs, and events of their age; on the other hand, they are men who look forward, and are spurred on by their vision of the future. They are ahead of their time, swimming against the tide of inertia of their own generation.

They propose bold, imaginative, untypical solutions to problems. Because they can see what is invisible to others, they dare to take on the impossible. Because they can see ahead, they are prophetic. Because they have nothing to lose, they are rebels. Public opinion either ignores them or misunderstands them. Those who live in the comfortable greyness of ordinary life feel upset and bothered by such troublemakers.

One day in August 1941, in semi-darkness in the oratory at 14 Diego de Leon Street, Madrid, Father Escrivá was leading a meditation. He spoke about faith, boldness, and daring to ask for the moon, in the unshakable confidence that God can give it.

“Afraid?” he said. “I’m not afraid of anyone! Not even of God, because he is my Father.” He turned and looked at the tabernacle, and added, as if speaking directly to someone there in the same room, “Lord, we’re not afraid of you, because we love you.” 2

Ut gigas … On an afternoon in November 1942, also in Madrid, Father Escrivá arrived at 19 Jorge Manrique Street. It was a center for women of the Work. At that moment there were just ten women in Opus Dei: Lola Fisac, Encarnita Ortega, Nisa Gonzalez, Lola Jiménez-Vargas, Amparo Rodriguez-Casado, Enriqueta Botella, Laura and Conchita López-Amo, Maria Jesús Hereza, and Aurora Oliden, who was from Leon and was a friend of Nisa.

Father Escrivá met with the three who were at home, Encarnita, Nisa, and Lola Fisac, in the sitting room-cum-library. He unfolded a paper and spread it out on the table. It was like a chart, a graphic plan setting out a variety of apostolic tasks. The women of the Work would carry them out all over the world, either as personal initiatives or corporate works. He explained the chart enthusiastically, pointing to each of the headings in turn: agricultural schools for country people; university halls of residence; maternity clinics; centers for the professional training of women in different areas—hospitality and catering, secretarial work, nursing, teaching, languages, and others; activities in the field of fashion; mobile libraries; bookshops. The most important thing of all was the apostolate of friendship, developed on an individual basis with their families, neighbors, acquaintances, and colleagues, “and that will always be impossible to register or measure.”

Father Escrivá repeated every now and again, “Dream, and your dreams will fall short!” The three looked at him, thunderstruck, astonished. It did not occur to them that they were to do all this themselves. It seemed more as if the Father were unfolding a wonderful dream for a faraway future. They felt unskilled, devoid of means or resources, and incapable.

Father Escrivá could read in their faces both desire and fear, a cowardly “If only we could….” He picked up the paper very slowly and started to fold it. His face had changed. He was very serious now—perhaps upset, or disappointed, or saddened.

He had been struggling for more than twelve years to give form and life to the ideal of having women in Opus Dei. This ideal was what he had seen God wanted on February 14, 1930. The first women to come to the Work had prayed a lot but never lifted a finger. They were very good, but of a mystical disposition: Father Escrivá had to tell them they were not suitable. Later on came others who talked a lot and bustled about, but did not pray. They left. The present ones belonged to “the third batch.” Could it be that, at the moment of truth, they were going to sit there paralyzed with fear?

Choosing his words carefully, he said, “When looking at all this, you can have one of two reactions. That of thinking it is something very fine but unreal and unrealizable. Or else that of trust in our Lord—that if he is asking us for all of this, he will help us follow it through.” He stopped. He looked at each of them individually, as though trying to transmit his own faith, communicate his own conviction. Before turning toward the door, he added, “I hope you will have the second reaction.” 3

They did. In the next forty years the women of Opus Dei spread over both hemispheres, and set up and put into action more than 40 university halls of residence, 200 cultural centers, 16 secretarial and language schools, 79 schools which were parents’ initiatives and another 12 as corporate projects, 94 institutes for professional training, and 13 agricultural schools for women. 4 They also started countless dispensaries, primary health care centers, literacy programs, campaigns for cultural and social development, food distribution services in rural areas, evening courses for primary and secondary education in working-class districts, and much more.

Ut gigas … Forty years on, those three women had multiplied by more than 10,000. As the men’s side of Opus Dei had spread, the women’s had too, in parallel, and was established in cities and towns in more than seventy countries and on every continent. In 1984, they were soon to begin their apostolate in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Macao, Ivory Coast, Zaire, Cameroon, Santo Domingo, New Zealand, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

Father Escrivá had a powerful, muscular faith. “A champion of the faith,” Cardinal Tedeschini called him. 5 He preached and worked hard. He was never intimidated. He chipped away at difficulties with his demanding mottoes: “More, more, more,” “Don’t be content with what is easy.” He was never satisfied. “You see: it has nearly all died out … will you not help to spread the blaze?” (The Way , no. 801). He was ambitious: “Our apostolate is a sea without shores.” He was always ready to set out anew: “So much has been destroyed! There is so much still to do!” He was fired with an unquenchable ideal: “Regnare Christum volumus! We want Christ to reign!”

Once when some of his sons were talking to him about the University of Navarre, he noticed a certain sense of complacency in their achievements, and at once warned them not to rest on their laurels. “This is only the beginning—within a short time there will be ten or twenty similar universities.” 6 And so there were: following on the University of Navarre in Spain, came the University of Piura in Peru, the Pan-American University in Mexico, La Sabana in Colombia, the Austral in Argentina, the Andes University in Chile, and the University of Asia and the Pacific in Manila, the Philippines. And plans were well under way for Strathmore University of Nairobi, Kenya and the Libero Istituto Universitario Campus Biomedico in Rome.

On November 17, 1969 in a gathering of university students, 7 someone mentioned La Moncloa University Hall in Madrid. Father Escrivá recalled how this hall had cost a lot of prayer. The owner of the building they rented and ran as a hall of residence in Jenner Street in Madrid had given them notice. The day it expired, Father Escrivá set out very early and went to the owner’s house, getting him out of bed. He had brought with him a check for 5,000 pesetas, at the time, 1943, a considerable sum. He gave it to the owner as a deposit to extend their lease until they could find another place.

Now it was back to square one. He searched high and low. He prayed with all his might. Before the lease expired, an industrialist called Messeguer from Murcia, in the south of Spain, turned up, and committed himself to help turn two neighboring houses, badly damaged by bombing during the civil war, into a hall of residence big enough for 100 students, and a third detached house into the base for the catering staff. The refurbishing was carried out in record time. Father Escrivá finished this account by saying, “Everything was sorted out, with no miracles; but I must say, with a lot of prayer.”

Just then, Father Jose Gil, a priest of the Work present at the get-together, spoke up with some good news. “Well, right now in La Moncloa we are seeing a miracle: out of 104 residents, ninety are coming to daily Mass. Just think, Father: ninety!”

“But aren’t they also bringing friends of theirs from other halls of residence?” asked Father Escrivá.

“Well, Father … we’re working on it.”

“We’ve been working on it, my son, since 1928! So that if each of them isn’t bringing another ten along with him, we can only talk about half a miracle.” 8

He had the dissatisfaction of a burning spirit who wanted to set fire to everything he touched. In Rome one day he was shown a recently published book by a son of his, the lawyer and theologian Father José Luis Illanes, on “sanctifying work.” He flipped through it, and then, without wasting time on expressions of satisfaction, told the people with him in the sitting room, “Other books like this can and should be written, on the spirit of service, on loyalty, friendship, human virtues, and so on. They would do souls a lot of good.” 9

Ut gigas … The plans for the construction of the shrine of Our Lady of Torreciudad were under study. Father Escrivá knew that, from a human point of view, it was crazy to consider building a basilica of monumental dimensions among the ridges of the Pyrenees. It was a challenge to those agnostic, materialistic times of soulless commercialism when pragmatism demanded that every cubic meter of concrete show a profit. Nevertheless he saw with the eyes of faith multitudes of pilgrims there.

“Build confessionals, lots of confessionals, because people will come from all over the world to get rid of their sins!” he said. He also gave the architects some challenging advice: “Don’t be afraid of size!” 10

Seeing the need to start human and spiritual training and development before adolescence, he encouraged the setting up of schools, and youth clubs for younger children, “not because at that age it is easier to win them over, but so that from an early age they can acquire the Christian principles they will need later on in order to preserve their faith and lead good lives.” 11

He insisted on the importance of providing professional, doctrinal, and moral training and support for women in all walks of life, at the university, in the home, in the countryside, in industry, and so on. He said “anti-Christian militants” were tirelessly promoting materialistic and atheistic ideas in this sphere. “And once the woman is corrupted, the family is corrupted, and then society is too.” 12

In a January 1968 interview with Pilar Salcedo, a journalist, in Villa Tevere he made ground-breaking statements which were published in Telva , a Spanish women’s magazine. 13 He talked about human love, marriage, the family, women in the home, and in the workplace, and about “not blocking up the sources of life.” Reading his replies with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Father Escrivá was anticipating a frontal attack by the feminist movements then in fashion; he was trying to cushion the blow, to absorb the impact of unpopularity which the encyclical Humanae Vitae , about to be published, would unleash on Paul VI. It was a way of serving the Church. Father Escrivá risked injury to himself by treading the path beforehand to clear the way.

He was also anticipating by twenty years Pope John Paul II’s reflections in the Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem on women and their role in society. The Telva interview underlined the dignity of women and their double vocation: to give life to humanity and humanity to life.

In a world of specialized technical know-how, Father Escrivá realized the need to promote the study of the humanities. This was not just because “it is essential to be a whole man,” but to counter trends which diminished the human person, leaving people unable to claim their historic, artistic, philosophical, and literary heritage.

Many of those who heard his talks and get-togethers during the 1960s recall how Father Escrivá pressed them “to wage war on poverty, ignorance, illness, suffering, and against the saddest of all forms of want: loneliness,” 14 while he encouraged them to channel the generosity of young people “into the great project of charity and justice whose aim is to ensure that there is no one who is poor, illiterate, or ignorant.” 15

He considered ignorance a great impediment to freedom that enslaves people by impeding their access to the truth. He did not hesitate to describe as “the worst kind of crime” 16 the activities of powerful people who rendered those under them defenseless by keeping them uneducated, misinformed, and in ignorance. “The greatest enemy of souls, of the Church and of God, is ignorance … which is not confined to one particular social class: you can find it everywhere.” 17

He drew a practical conclusion: “The Church of Jesus Christ is not at all afraid of scientific truth. And we, children of God in Opus Dei, have a duty to make our presence felt in all the human sciences. Backed by sound doctrine, how much good we will do to souls! How much ignorance we will dispel!” 18 “People who appear to be far from God only seem so. They are fine, good people…but they are ignorant. Even their sins are like blasphemies on the lips of a child: they don’t realize what they are doing. People are not bad. People are good. I don’t know any bad people. I do know ignorant people. That is why I never get tired of saying that Opus Dei is not anti-anything. We have to love everyone a lot: evil can only be drowned in an abundance of good.” 19

Ut gigas … He opened his arms wide to the lonely, the downtrodden, the weak, the mistaken, the defenseless, without excluding anyone. “And if you ask me whether I love communists, I will say yes, communists too! Not Communism, though. It is a heresy full of heresies, a brutal materialism which leads to tyranny; but I do love communists, because they are in great need.” 20

In one gathering he talked about someone from Central America, a well-known Jewish Freemason, who had come to see him in Rome. “I asked him, ‘Why do you love the Work so much?’ He answered, ‘Because I’ve found a lot of understanding and openness in the Work.’ Then I said to him, ‘My friend, all the Freemasons I’ve met in my country are fanatics; but you’re not a fanatic, and that is why, although you’re not a Catholic or even a Christian, you are helping us.’ Then I promised him I would pray for him very much. And I explained why I love Jewish people such a lot: ‘My first love is a Jew— Jesus Christ. And my second love is also Jewish: his most holy mother Mary.’ I gave him a medal of Our Lady. He was delighted!” 21

However, because of his conviction that the Catholic faith he held was the true faith, his limitless understanding for everyone did not lead him to compromise on doctrine, or to debase the content of truth by leaving out difficult bits, which would have been a false ecumenism. Whether in public or private conversation with Muslims, Protestants, Jews, or Buddhists, he would say: “You do not have the whole truth. I am going to pray that one day you will achieve the gift of the true faith. But I assure you that you do have all my respect: I respect you and I respect your freedom.” 22

Father Escrivá’s respect for freedom was born of and nourished by respect for each person, because each possesses the supreme dignity of being a child of God. Once when reading the morning news during a trip to Spain in October 1968, he was deeply troubled to see that a publication where some of his sons worked was making a personal attack on someone. He commented, “I cannot defend my children’s freedom out there, if my children don’t first of all defend the freedom of others. You can speak the truth, criticize things which are going badly, and offer well-thought-out resistance at a high level of debate, but you cannot stoop to blows below the belt. We cannot have two different moral standards, one for ourselves and another for other people. No, my sons. We have just one moral standard: Christ.” 23

Father Escrivá made his daughters and sons in Opus Dei realize that the centers of the Work and their activities were to be open to all classes of people without any discrimination on grounds of belief, race, social class, or ideology. But each activity did need to be appropriate to the social group and cultural level it was intended for, “because Opus Dei does not take anyone out of their environment.”

In Africa, too, he was ahead of his time and of the socio-political changes later to come about in Kenya with independence, which was not even dreamed of when people of the Work first went there. The founder held firmly that the two corporate educational projects developed in Nairobi by women and men of the Work had to be interracial. This aroused not only the opposition of the white British residents, but also the suspicions of the Africans and of the Indian colony, none of them integrated with the others. Kianda College and Strathmore College were finally built in an area which enabled people of different races, creeds, and social classes to be educated together.

The same thing happened in other countries where integration at first seemed impossible. Where Chicago runs into West Side, he encouraged a club for the education and training of boys and young men. Midtown Center is open to boys, whose environment is a mix of drugs, sex, idleness, crime, violence, and poverty. The center staff labors to prevent boys from starting on the downward spiral called “there’s nothing to be done.” 24 With the same aim women of Opus Dei work in the heart of the Bronx to give girls who live in this area of crime, rootless lives, and foul language something their schools have defaulted on and their families cannot supply.

Father Escrivá often said, “Charity does not mean giving loose change and old clothes. We have to give love! We have to give our hearts!”

One day in January 1969 in Rome his eyes shone as he talked about the rehabilitation and social integration gradually taking place among the black people of Harlem. “All of us human beings are made of the same clay. We all speak the same tongue. We are all the same color, as children of the same Father. We are all children of God! We’re all equal! This project makes me very happy. Treat them as equals, looking them in the eye, face to face, never looking down on them. Are they less educated? Well, let’s give them an education! The cleverer ones can do a university degree. We can give the less clever ones the teaching they need so as to lead decent lives.” 25

In May 1970 during a catechesis in Mexico to a group of people from the United States, he said: “I have something very harsh to say to you. I understand the great problem you have with black people in your country. If we look for the root of the problem, we will find that both sides have been and are at fault. The result is that there is great resentment toward the whites. You need to be prepared to spend two or three years working without expecting anything in return. If you are constant, you will win their confidence, by working with devotion and affection…. About 200 years ago, there were more black people in Mexico than in the U.S. It did not cause any problems. If there were any problems, they have been able to overcome them in these two centuries, with divine love and human love, unafraid of mixing races. We have to be convinced of this reality which I will not tire of repeating: there aren’t lots of different races—Caucasian, black, yellow, brown. There is only one race: the race of the children of God!” 26

He said that again in Mexico at the old estate of Montefalco, where since the early 1950s people of Opus Dei, with many others, had been carrying out an enormous social, cultural, and apostolic project among local Indians. “No one is greater than anyone else—no one! We are all equal! Each one of us is worth the same: we are worth the blood of Christ.” 27

At Villa Tevere on November 11, 1966, an upper-class family from Barcelona named Vallet came to visit him. It was a big group. Among them was a boy wearing the smart uniform of Viaro School. Father Escrivá took the lad aside and told him something he might previously not have known: his parents were paying the school so that another boy from a poor family could study there too. That was sharing. That was practicing social justice and human solidarity.

Turning to the adults, he stressed the same point. “We have to achieve the disappearance of the poor by raising them up; not by pulling down the upper classes.” 28

On countless occasions Father Escrivá explained the Christian criteria of social justice. It was “not what the Marxists say; it is not a class struggle: that is a great injustice…. Social justice is not achieved by violence, or shooting, or forming factions.” 29 And again: “Those at the bottom have to come up. Those on top will fall of their own accord if they are no good.” 30

One day in May 1967 he said to some of his sons: “We want there to be fewer poor, fewer people with no training, fewer suffering from illness or disability, or suffering in old age. That is our aim. But you won’t achieve that by setting people against each other. Besides, I insist, the ones at the top will fall of their own accord. What we have to do is advance those at the bottom. We are enemies of violence.” 31

He went to see the building work at Molinoviejo and walked around the site on foot. Seeing Juan Cabrera, the foreman, he waited for him with open arms and they greeted each other with a big hug. Then, during the tour of the site, he talked with the workers he met. “It’s only fair, isn’t it? They have to pay you well for your work. And if they don’t, you must say so.”

A carpenter reassured him, “Father, don’t worry: they pay us very well here.”

“Look here, my son, I would like all your children to be able to study. And that’s not just talk; I spend a lot of effort on making it happen.” 32

In the autumn of 1968 he had to go to Spain from Rome. To save time he agreed to travel by boat instead of going by car as was his habit. He drove from Rome to Naples, intending to embark on the Michelangelo for Algeciras. But a strike by the crew forced him to stay in Naples for a week. He did not get impatient. When he eventually reached his destination, he talked about his adventures. “It seemed absurd to me, with all that there is to be done, to waste a week in Naples. But very often in life I have experienced how things happened to me that I didn’t understand at the time; but years later our Lord has made me see that they did make sense. If God wills, I will understand the Naples episode. If not … they will explain it to me in heaven, if all of you help me to get there!”

As for the strike: “As far as I know, having spoken to several of them, these men had reason to complain. To save money, the shipping company was operating with the minimum of staff. Because of that, many sailors and stewards, most of whom were very young, could only spend one month a year with their families. That’s not just, and it isn’t human either!” 33 Later they learned that he had hardly left his cabin during the voyage because of the worldly atmosphere on board.

He was a priest who did not interfere in politics, or argue about current issues that were open to free debate. He only spoke about God and what could bring men to God. Still, some of his texts could be used as guidelines for a substantial program of political, economic, or social action. For instance: “We have to uphold the right of all to live; to own what they need in order to live with dignity; to work and to rest; to choose a particular state in life; to form a home, to bring children into the world within marriage and bring them up; to be able to face times of sickness and old age in security; to have access to education and culture; to join with other citizens to achieve legitimate ends; and, above all, we have to uphold the right of all to know and love God in perfect freedom.” 34

One afternoon in December 1971, in Villa Vecchia, Father Escrivá was talking to two of his sons who had just come from Spain, Pablo Bofill and Rafael Caamaño. The subject of “the option for the poor” arose. Slowly, as if exploring the depths of the mystery, he concluded, “All souls are poor. But the Church is rich. Yes. And her riches are the sacraments; and her doctrine; and all the merits of Christ….” 35 He sprang to his feet smartly. A moment before, while talking about other matters, he had seemed like an old man, weighed down by a heavy burden of suffering. Now he was transformed: he was standing tall, looking cheerful, strong, and courageous, as if about to set off on a cross-country run.