Josemaria Escriva, a man of contrasts

Pilar Urbano

Tags: History, books, Opus Dei, Rome

Pilar Urbano

When I started work on a biography of Josemaria Escriva (El Hombre de Villa Tevere / “The Man of Villa Tevere”, 1995), the most troubling question in my mind was whether or not there was a “man” to write about; whether, now that the living person was no longer there, I would find myself buried fathoms deep in dry paper archives, and abstract testimonies with no scenery or action. That was what I feared: to have to face a virtuous hero, elevated, sublime, but somehow dehumanized.

A protagonist of flesh and blood
As I started to explore, in scene after scene I found a protagonist of flesh and blood coming to meet me. I was indeed looking at a Christian hero, but this was a hero with no epic and no halo. He was a hero of daily life, of ordinary, normal things, of the here and now. An all-terrain hero. At one point I even felt I was just looking at a priest. That was what he said himself to Dr Hruska, his dentist, when, drilling, the dentist pleaded, “Monsignore, say something, tell me if I’m hurting you.” “Carry on, carry on,” responded Escriva, “do whatever you have to. Don’t worry about me, I’m just a priest!”

He was a priest with no parish but with parishioners right round the world. Shaped in the antique mold, perhaps, and holding on to the traditional devotions of our grandparents; but so much in advance of his times that when he explained his teachings in the Vatican he was told, “You have come a century too soon.” A jokey priest who referred to his cassock as “this umbrella-cover”, but who kissed it every morning before putting it on. A priest who was just as much at home in the streets of Madrid, Rome or London as in the shadows of a sacristy. A priest who, conscious of his citizenship, demanded his rights with the firmness that came of fulfilling his duties conscientiously. A paradoxical priest who declared himself to be “anticlerical”… because of his love for the Church.

Either a Saint or a stumbling-block
I did not need to break any statues to touch the humanity of the person I was describing. He was a priest who trembled with awe when he consecrated the bread and wine at Mass, and trembled likewise with grief on hearing the news of the soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He would sometimes sign his letters “the sinner Josemaría”, and when reading the newspaper he would weep for the sins of the world. So, he was a good sinner. He was someone who knew he was an easily-replaceable instrument, but still an instrument that had been chosen to be used by God, to tackle a task that was beyond his own capabilities. He had a clear option before him: either to be a saint, or a stumbling-block in the fulfilment of his mission. And on that basis he took a “decisive decision” that nothing should turn aside his unstoppable course: to do Opus Dei in order to serve the Church, and fall madly in love with God. That was the person I had to deal with: a saint. A saint with blood in his veins. A man, meaning a sacred territory compounded of weaknesses and mysteries. A leveller of obstacles. A fighter, on war footing against himself. A formidable mixture of clay and grace.

A man of contrasts…
Now, my most unexpected discovery was the contrasts in this man. Every time I set myself to consider a story about him, or a phrase of his, or a scene from his life, I knew that I had my finger on some guiding threads. They were electrically charged, as though with alternating current: his talents, his virtues, his underlying attitudes, running in contrast with values which, instead of neutralizing them, generated a dynamic tension or a mutual enrichment, with arrays of color-shades, lights and shadows. Escriva, full of energy and initiative, was at the same time Escriva the sick man, whose soul had to drive his body to reach the end of the day. Escriva the high-spirited jokester with a constant song on his lips was also Escriva the ascetic, self-mortified, and often fasting. Escriva who undertook exhausting days on trips abroad without a minute to himself, Escriva to whom “resting” meant “working on something else”, was also Escriva who had neither time-plans nor even a watch. “My time-plan is in God’s hands,” he would say. “I don’t need a watch: after one thing comes the next.” Escriva who appeared on stage to preach, and whose magnetism struck home and drew large crowds, was also Escriva who aimed at total self-effacement, saying and meaning that “my role is to disappear, so that it is Jesus who shines out.”

… but not of contradictions
The contrasts I observed in Josemaria Escriva did not contradict one another. Instead, each served to reinforce and guarantee its counterpart. They were a moral touchstone, struck by which each piece rang true. In Escriva, each contrast was like a hallmark, authenticating a virtue. Thus, it was not an absence of tears, but the smile that broke through the tears, that witnessed to a suffering voluntarily undergone for the sake of love. Poverty can be said to be sought as a virtue, not when penury is endured, but when the person gives generously to someone who is in still greater need; or when they refuse something superfluous or go without something necessary, even when it is within their grasp.

Opus Dei’s revolutionary novelty
Space does not permit a torrent of vivid stories – of which there are many, all duly witnessed – which show Escriva incarnating both in public and in private an endless succession of pairs of virtuous contrasts. I will just give one or two illustrations.

Opus Dei’s revolutionary novelty does not invent anything new. Like all revolutions, it goes back to the sources, and in that pristine spirit rediscovers in a radically new way that every man and woman, by the very fact of being born, is designed for holiness. Christians, as such, have the energy – the spirit – to vivify civil society from within, establishing the “city of God” in the “city of men”. And that is the real meaning of history.

Escriva’s whole life was a wager of hope. His fertile sowing of the seed by the handful, on all terrains, produced a rich harvest of vocations for the Church. His wearying juridico-canonical pilgrimage led him to find what he had not sought and seek what he did not find – although he knew that it existed. Very early on, he could already see the right form for Opus Dei to take, but forty years were to pass before the Church brought it into being. During that time Escriva did not merely sit down and wait. From day’s end to day’s end he plunged into an arduous job of work, because he had to clear paths which had remained untrodden for seventeen centuries: the paths along which the laity, the ordinary people, could reach the point of being truly “a holy race, a royal priesthood”. It was a task requiring a delicate touch; the last thing he wanted was to seem to be engaging in litigation against the Holy See. Despite his best efforts – and Escriva was never content to “make do”, but persevered until he had set the very last stone in place – he died without seeing Opus Dei established as a Personal Prelature.

Pilar Urbano, journalist and writer, is the author of a biography of St Josemaria: El Hombre de Villa Tevere, Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1995.