A man who knew how to forgive Lessons from the life of St Josemaría Escrivá
by Fr Francesc Faus
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE
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Contents Stories of forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Forgiveness in a climate of hatred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Forgiveness in times of war . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 Forgiveness in peacetime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51
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Stories of forgiveness Forgiving another person is one of the most difficult human actions. Injustice provokes a passionate reaction, and often it can seem that forgiving the other person would be a mistake, as though condoning an act of aggression or accepting an injury in a cowardly way. Forgiving someone is also hard because, far from indifference or coldness in the face of evil, it entails suffering a real “wound,” and then pardoning the other person from one’s heart. Perhaps that is why people sometimes say that forgiving can be beyond human strength. To live without forgiveness would be inhuman; a person who refuses to forgive hurts only himself in the end. But how can we always forgive? How can we accept the past and assimilate negative personal experiences? There are no easy answers to these questions. The path to forgiveness is never an easy one, and each of us has to find our own way. This book offers some stories of forgiveness from the life of Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, who was canonized in 2002 by Blessed John Paul II. He is a modern-day saint who strove during his whole life to learn ever better the secret of forgiveness from the One who, nailed to a cross, prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34)
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Forgiveness in a climate of hatred Josemaría Escrivá was a young priest, twenty-nine years old, when in 1931 the lowering clouds of hatred and violence threatened the imminent onset of what would become a catastrophic civil war. A young and poor student In March 1925, at the age of twenty-three, he had been ordained a priest in Saragossa. In April 1927 he moved to Madrid with his widowed mother, Doña Dolores, and his sister and brother, Carmen and Santiago, to pursue a doctorate in law. In Madrid, while studying for his doctorate, he dedicated himself to an intense work of service to the poor and abandoned in the outskirts of the city and to the incurably sick in the public hospitals. He also gave classes of Roman Law and Canon Law in the Cicuéndez Academy, which provided the small salary with which he tried to support his family. After his father’s financial ruin and death, his family had gone through some hard times, and often suffered real want. There in Madrid on the October 2, 1928, with social and political unrest already beginning to break out, Josemaría had seen what his mission on earth was to be: opening up in the middle of the world a “path of holiness
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in professional work and in the fulfillment of the Christian’s ordinary duties,” as we read in the prayer card asking for St Josemaría’s intercession. This path, which later was to become known as Opus Dei, offered a new ideal, one that back then seemed revolutionary: that holiness could be attained in daily life by any Christian, amid the professional, family, and social relationships that make up ordinary life for most people. Darkening clouds In circles close to the Falange (the far-right party of Fascist inspiration), the conviction was growing that the only dialogue possible with the radical left (the socialists, anarchists, and communists, who were united by the alliances of the government of the Republic) was “the dialectic of fists and guns.” At the same time, in the agitated ranks of the anarchists and the communists, still intoxicated by the recent victory of the Communist revolution in Russia in 1917, it was not unusual to hear someone say that Spain’s problems would only be solved “on the day the last priest was strangled with the intestines of the last bishop.” The propaganda of the far left, integrated in the heterogeneous coalition that formed the governing Popular Front, exacerbated the hatred and prejudice against religion. For had not Marx himself defined religion as the “opium of the people,” and wasn’t Christianity being
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implacably persecuted in Russia? The Church and the clergy were seen as reactionary agents who had to be eliminated. Messianic and antagonistic ideologies boiled up, closed to any possibility of dialogue. The great majority of the population was not in agreement with these extreme ideologies. After free elections, a centrist coalition held power for a short period of time. But the Pandora’s box of extremism had been opened, and the streets of Madrid, Barcelona and other cities were already flowing with the blood of the dead of both sides, while the “people’s militias” left churches and convents in flames. On May 11, 1931, smoke from the burning of ten convents and monasteries darkened the sky of Madrid. The following day, similar events took place in many Spanish cities, and over a hundred monasteries and convents were set on fire. The civil authorities proved to be helpless in containing the situation. In October 1934, an unsuccessful coup d’état took place in Asturias, which resulted in the destruction of 58 churches and the killing of 34 priests. The Popular Front government was relentlessly taken hostage by the extremists, whose eagerness to do away with religion and priests led to open persecution against Catholics. Thus Catholics had no alternative but to join, often unwillingly, the side opposed to the government of the Republic.
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It is easy to imagine the heightened tensions and political fervour among young people and adults during those years of the thirties. Josemaría Escrivá had begun to spread the Christian ideals of Opus Dei among university students and workers: very few at first, and at a slow rate. When the war broke out, the number of members of Opus Dei was less than a dozen, all young people, and most of them students, at an age when passions are strongest. Amid these polarizing currents, Josemaría Escrivá created around him an atmosphere of reconciliation and friendship, with respect for all social and political positions that a Catholic could defend, along with a serene understanding of those who held ideological positions incompatible with or even aggressively opposed to Christianity. He thus made a reality in his own life the motto of St Augustine: Interficere errorem, diligere errantem. “Fight against error, but love the person who is mistaken.” For Josemaría, fighting against error meant knowing how to dialogue and learning to listen to those who do not agree with us, and doing so with patience and respect. A heart in love with freedom One of Escrivá’s first followers, Pedro Casciaro, was the son of a staunch socialist, a prominent republican who after the civil war was persecuted by the Nationalists but managed to save his life by fleeing to
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Algiers. Pedro was studying mathematics and architecture in Madrid, and shared in almost all of St Josemaría’s adventures during the agitated years leading up to the war. So his testimony, condensed in an exciting book, Dream and Your Dreams Will Fall Short, is of great value. Pedro relates that the Father (as those close to St Josemaría called him) “instilled serenity in us. His reflective, balanced attitude was in total contrast to the polarization all around us. He never discussed political matters. His judgments of events were always exclusively priestly ones. . . . He suffered a lot: for the Church and for the situation in his country, which he loved so much. He respected any opinion, related to public life, which a Christian could legitimately hold.” Casciaro recalls that, among the few members of Opus Dei and the other young people Escrivá was guiding spiritually, there was a great diversity of political views, and that Escrivá “taught us to have a great respect for each person’s freedom.” One of those young men, José Luis Múzquiz, a recent graduate in engineering, relates that some of them were curious to know where the Father’s political sympathies lay: “I asked him what opinion he had about a very famous political figure at the time. He replied immediately: ‘Look, nobody here will ask you about your political views. People from all sectors come here: