Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
July 17, 2002
Followers mark Blessed Escriva's birth with symposium, conference
Scholars discuss Opus Dei founder's theology
By Michelle Martin
EVANSTON, Ill. (CNS) — The centenary of the birth of Blessed Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer brought about 50 participants to an academic symposium on his thought where they presented sometimes differing views of his work.
Josemaria Escriva, Spanish-born priest, founded the organization known as Opus Dei in 1928 to promote the call to holiness in everyday life. He is to be canonized Oct. 6.
At the symposium in Evanston June 27, Paul Griffiths, who holds the Schmitt Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, drew sharp disagreement over his discussion of gift and obligation in Blessed Escriva's work.
Griffiths acknowledged that he is a newcomer to Blessed Escriva, having first picked up his works only about six months before.
But from what he has read, he said, he finds an emphasis on obligation — a Christian's obligation to God and God's reciprocal obligation to the Christian. According to Griffiths, that obligation pushes the bounds of traditional Christian orthodoxy, which most often treats sanctification as a gift to be freely offered by God, not as an action God is obliged by human devotion to give.
"I suspect that this is a problem, an undesirable feature of Blessed Escriva's thought, a feature that leads him to the borderlands of Christian orthodoxy," Griffiths wrote in his paper. "Perhaps those borderlands are where saints always do their work."
In a response to Griffiths, Scott Hahn, a theology professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, objected vehemently, saying Griffiths had taken Blessed Escriva out of context by failing to see the relationship of God and the faithful as a parent-child relationship.
While children may indeed expect certain things of their fathers, especially if the children work to uphold their end of the relationship, they cannot obligate their fathers to confer any special favors, Hahn said.
By the same token, the style of exhortation that Griffiths compared to that of a "drill sergeant" takes on a different meaning in the context of a father disciplining a child with love, Hahn said.
Another paper, delivered by Janne Haaland Matlary, a political science professor at the University of Oslo, Norway, looked at Blessed Escriva's emphasis on work as a path to holiness. In her experience, she said, what is more important than the work itself is the intention with which it is done.
In his response, Rabbi David Novak, a professor at the University of Toronto, discussed the Jewish understanding of work and the Sabbath. The 39 kinds of work expressly forbidden on the Sabbath are those that went into the building of the temple sanctuary, he said, teaching that, "Even if your work during the week is the building of the sanctuary, the sanctuary in time is more important than the sanctuary in space."
Work then becomes sacred, as it is done to prepare for the Sabbath, time for the Lord, rather than simply being a break from work, he said.
Papers also were presented on "Friendship and Personalism" by Michael Pakaluk of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and "Secularity: On Being `Leaven' in the World," by Christopher Wolfe of Marquette University in Milwaukee.
The symposium, sponsored by the Shellbourne Conference Center and the American Public Philosophy Institute, was followed June 28 by a larger conference for roughly 500 people on topics of more general interest.
Yolanda Martinez, a mother of five from Oak Lawn, Ill., told The Catholic New World, newspaper of the Chicago Archdiocese, that before finding Opus Dei she rarely found time for God.
"I realize that before, I made time for everything except God," she said. A neighbor who baby-sat for her introduced Martinez to "the work of God" as the name Opus Dei means in Latin.
"At first, I was suspicious," she said. "I didn't know if it was Catholic or something else."
Squire Lance, a special assistant to the Cook County, Ill., circuit court clerk, said he went looking for Opus Dei when he found himself at loose ends after his candidate for governor lost the 1976 election. After joining Opus Dei, he became a different person, Lance said. He began spending more time with his family and started treating people with more respect.
It changed him so much that his wife, a Methodist, decided to become Catholic. Lance recalled that when his spiritual director met with her to begin her instruction, he asked her why she wanted to convert.
"Because Opus Dei and the Catholic Church gave me my husband back," she told the priest.
"I don't want anyone to get the idea that we're perfect people," Lance said. "But we're people who have agreed to struggle."
Opus Dei was designated a personal prelature of the Catholic Church in 1982, meaning it is governed by its own bishop from its headquarters in Rome, rather than by the bishops in dioceses in which it operates. About 98 percent of its 80,000 members in 81 countries are lay people. Blessed Escriva led Opus Dei until his death in 1975.
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