Reflection of the Week
“It is impossible to evaluate the help we receive from a loyal and sincere friend or the influence of a good mother over her family.”
- St. Josemaria Escriva
Conversations, 31
Articles
Passionately Loving the World
By St. Josemaria Escriva
"I assure you, my children, that when a Christian carries out with love the most insignificant everyday action, that action overflows with the transcendence of God. That is why I have told you so often, and hammered away at it, that the Christian vocation consists in making heroic verse out of the prose of each day. Heaven and earth seem to merge, my children, on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives..."
Developing Families with Personalities
By Msgr. Cormac Burke
"The family is under siege today, and it is weak. It is taking a battering and in many places is going under. You are aware of the situation; perhaps you are not sure of what to do. Supernaturally you have to do a lot: to pray more, rely more on the sacrament of marriage and its particular sacramental graces. And, humanly, you have to give a lot to your family: not material things, but personality. This is the point I want to make to you...you have to give more personality - much more personality - to your family."
The Vocation of Marriage
By Msgr. Cormac Burke
"Marriage is approached more and more selfishly today. Far too many people look on it as simply a way that should be satisfying to me and, on balance, should make me happy, because it will bring me more satisfactions than burdens. This whole approach is deeply flawed. It is not that people expect too much of marriage; they expect the wrong thing. Such an approach is too small, too self-centered. It looks on marriage for the companionship or security or ease or pleasure it seems to promise, not for the mission it entails. It reduces marriage to the comfortable and shared calculations of two people, when it is meant to be an open-ended adventure involving three to begin with: husband and wife and God...; and all that this can lead to."
Novena for Work: An Interview
On October 10, 2009, Fr. Francisco Faus, author of the Novena for Work through the intercession of St. Josemaria Escriva, was interviewed by the St. Josemaria Information Center in Rome. The "Novena for Work" has become a prayerful tool that hundreds of people around the world have employed in their search for work and in fulfilling their work.
The Family - Seedbed of Vocations
By Fr. C. John McCloskey
"We know that the core teaching of the Second Vatican Council is the radical call of all to holiness. However, we also know that God calls a chosen few, that should be many, to follow him even more closely in a life of apostolic celibacy for the kingdom of God, whether it be as a priest, religious, or layperson. The founder of Opus Dei [St. Josemaria Escriva] once remarked that those called by God owe ninety percent of their vocation to their parents. The family is the seedbed of vocations."
St. Josemaria Escriva: 10 Questions about Marriage
Edited by the St. Josemaria Information Center in Rome, St Josemaria answers ten questions about love, marriage, engagement, faithfulness, raising children, keeping a family united, and what happens when a couple can’t have children.
Teaching the Faith in the Family: Guidelines from St. Josemaria Escriva
By Dr. Michele Dolz
"The parents' mission to educate their children in the faith stems from the sacraments. When they teach the faith at home, it is the Church that is teaching. Their home is the domestic Church. Besides being a duty, it is a right..."
When Love is Strengthened
By Bishop Javier Echevarria
"St Josemaria would invite people to take the Holy Family as their model and also to try their best, with daily self-giving, to make their family life into a foretaste of heaven."
The Message of St. Josemaría: Particularly Relevant Ideas for Today’s Society
By Fr. Martin Rhonheimer
"Christian life does not consist only in saving oneself from the corruption of this world through faith and an appropriate attitude, but rather in an interior transformation in Christ brought about by the Spirit of God, that should also lead to an interior renovation and salvation of the world through the grace of God: that is, to its 'sanctification'."
Letting God Work: Pope Benedict XVI on St. Josemaria Escriva
By Pope Benedict XVI
"I have always been struck by the interpretation which Josemaría Escrivá gave of the name Opus Dei—an interpretation which we could call biographical and which allows us to understand the founder in his spiritual dimension. Escrivá knew that he should found something, but he was always aware that whatever it was not his work, that he had not invented anything, that the Lord had simply made use of him. Thus it was not his work, but Opus Dei [Latin for 'work of God']. He was only an instrument with which God had acted."