I recently read two pieces of literature, if one could call it that, which have completely confused me.

The first is a report by the chairperson of a permanent committee of the British Parliament where he declared that “people who practice Christianity in this Parliament seem to be acceptable as long as they don’t take it too seriously”! From the other side of the Atlantic I read a piece that went something like “it is acceptable to have middle of the road Christians in public life”. What, in heaven’s name, is a middle of the road Christian? Maybe it’s a form of indifference that is detested in scripture more stringently than those who make the wrong moral choices?

Next Monday, a Catholic Cabinet Minister in Brown’s government, Ruth Kelly, will conscientiously opt to refuse to endorse a proposed law giving the green light to produce animal-human hybrids and the possibility to have children without fathers, and will absent herself accordingly. There is already and will be a huge outcry for her resignation. Conscience has no place in a government Cabinet of ministers, God forbid! That would be the epitome of a great disaster!

You had often exclaimed that where heaven and earth really met was in a person’s heart and that every person’s way to self-fulfilment in the real transcendental sense lay in the daily work one was wont to perform. The point being that one performed one’s work properly whatever the conditions you found yourself in. You even created a lay Christian institution versed towards this ethic and based on a confidential relation with Christ. Of course many in the world did not understand you then, as they do not now. Of course they never really understood the Master either as they do not now. There was also then, as now, the persecution from the “good”. Your perseverance on this point won the day and the institution you created stands as a lay Christian bulwark in a secular world. Your main concern was to bring to the man in the street the concept of divine filiation, real humility, freedom, and last but not least, joy.

It is no wonder that your brother Paul, more recently thought fit to compare the modern world with ancient Rome. People today have the wrong concept of freedom. The more they crave freedom in doing whatever they want, the more they lose their freedom. Their search for existence is based on the thinking that this follows their being. You knew instinctively however that metaphysically, existence precedes being. Just as form is to matter, so is existence to being! Christians in whatever workplace can be a real light to the present world. There will inevitably be persecutions of all kinds of course, but you understood that those that are in the hands of God fall in the hands of God.

I want to remember you for what you went through, this being the 33rd anniversary of your death and the 80th year of the founding of the institution. It is good to know that people of all social persuasions left, centre and right, will always find a welcome home in Catholic orthodoxy. Chesterton himself used to say, “Christianity was never tried and found wanting, rather it was found difficult and not tried.”

St Josémaria Escrivá founded Opus Dei for laymen and women, both married and single, in 1928. It is today a separate special Diocese of the Catholic Church, called a Personal Prelature. His preferred self-description, today one of the symbols of the Prelature, was the donkey. His liturgical feast day is on 26 June.

Michael Asciak