1928 · Madrid, Spain

Founding of Opus Dei

In 1928, a young Spanish priest named Josemaría Escrivá founded Opus Dei with the idea that ordinary laypeople could seek holiness through their everyday work — a concept that was radical at the time and would eventually reshape Catholic thinking about the role of the laity.

Josemaría Escrivá was twenty-six years old and saying Mass in Madrid on October 2, 1928, when he experienced what he described as a clear vision of what God was asking him to do: help ordinary people find God in the middle of their everyday lives. Not in monasteries. Not through vows of poverty. At their desks, in their kitchens, on the factory floor. He called it Opus Dei — the Work of God. The idea that laypeople had a vocation to holiness through their secular work was not entirely new, but Escrivá pushed it further than anyone had before. He insisted that a banker or a taxi driver or a mother changing diapers could pursue sanctity with the same seriousness as a cloistered monk. The approach attracted professionals, academics, and students. It also attracted controversy. Critics called Opus Dei secretive and controlling. Its practices of self-mortification — the cilice and discipline — drew particular attention. Its influence in Spanish politics under Franco added another layer of suspicion. Escrivá sought and received an unusual canonical status for the organization. In 1982, John Paul II made Opus Dei a personal prelature — the only one in the Church — giving it a structure independent of local bishops. Escrivá was canonized in 2002, just twenty-seven years after his death, in one of the fastest canonization processes in modern history. Opus Dei today has about 90,000 members in more than sixty countries. Most are laypeople living ordinary lives. Whatever one thinks of the organization, its core idea — that holiness belongs in the workplace, not just in the cloister — has become mainstream Catholic teaching, affirmed explicitly by Vatican II.

Why it matters

Pioneered the idea of sanctification through ordinary work decades before Vatican II affirmed the universal call to holiness, and became one of the most influential — and debated — organizations in modern Catholicism.