Opus Dei in Society - Mission in Society and General Strategy

Mission in Society and General Strategy

According to Catholic officials and scholars, Opus Dei is God's Work performing a divine operation in society which mobilises Christians to sanctify secular realities from within. Opus Dei does not act as a group, they say. It is a spiritual, catechetical agency of the Catholic Church in charge of forming people so they can act with personal responsibility "to put Christ on top of all human activitites," as their founder says.

Escriva said that Opus Dei evangelises people of all social classes: "Out of a hundred souls, we are interested in one hundred." Opus Dei’s Statutes says that the goal of Opus Dei is to bring about that persons of all walks of life, first of all the intellectuals, practice Christianity through the sanctification of their work "so that all things will be put in order according to the Will of the Creator." (2.1 and 2.2; See Fuenmayor 1994, p. 610-611)

According to Vittorio Messori in his book Opus Dei: Leadership and Vision in Today’s Catholic Church, Opus Dei’s manner of influencing society is based on the principle that "there is no way of improving humanity other than improving human beings—one by one, and profoundly." Thus it has what it calls apostolate of friendship. Also, it follows the strategy of emphasising the evangelisation of the intelligentsia because, he says, "society arrives at the majority of its ideas and modes of behavior by way of the intellectuals." (p. 111; 177)

So that the sanctification of society can take place through sanctification of work, the Opus Dei provides "professional formation." This stresses hard work, cultural and professional development, human warmth and refinement, ethical behaviour, respect for freedom and pluralism, personal and collective humility, and personal prayer as the highest priority in one's daily schedule.

The main strategy, according to Escrivá's teaching, is that each Christian must strive to become a "canonizable saint", another Christ redeeming all men and women, and thus also a responsible citizen who works for the common good. Because if Christians are not well ordered from within, he says, if they do not put God first through a life of contemplation, they will be merely spreading their disorder to other people. "These world crises", he says, "are crises of saints." Thus, evangelization in Opus Dei is done one-on-one through its "apostolate of friendship and confidence."

Peter L. Berger and Samuel Huntington calls the attempt of Opus Dei an "alternative modernity," a work towards a modern world which is "faithful" to the Christian traditions, as distinguished from other secular interventions in modernity. (Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World 2002)