Dao De Jing

Saint.

TO BE a SAINT, according to the catholic Church, is to be perfect and free of any fault, although the most important thing happens when the Church declares officially a person like saint, because it orders then to give him cult universally. Nevertheless, the sense of the word holiness for the Opus Dei not only is the saint's quality, that is to say, the person of special virtue and example, but also the honorific treatment that is given to the Pope. And in this more terrestrial dimension the Opus Dei keeps on conspiring to look a successor for Juan Pablo II at the head of the Church, which is consistent with its ambitions and desires.

As the year 2002 is the centenary of the birth of the founder of the Opus Dei, the ultracatholic organization claimed with so many urgency the official declaration as saint of the founder who turned its supposed holiness into a turbosantidad. The living force or existing pressure is understood for turbosantidad to reach the holiness and that makes use of possible most of the prime mover of the Opus Dei, in such a way that there has been a powerful human turbine the one that it has pushed up to the holiness to the founder.

The prestiges manufacture has been one of the activities on which the Opus Dei has centred from its origins. As all its members must aspire to the holiness, the Opus Dei maintains the pretension to create saints in series, because "the world crises are a saints' crisis", as the founder already indicated in the maxim 301 of its librito I Walk. From its origins, the Opus Dei imposed this obligation between its members and it is still ready to make saints as it is, resorting to the turbosantidad when it needs, as it has been the case of the founder.

First there were attempts with Isidoro Zorzano Ledesma, engineer partner of the founder during the baccalaureate in Logronio and the first manager of the God's Work during the Spanish civil war. In the forties they did not find at all holier and heroic than the dark life and the scarce virtues of the engineer Zorzano. After its death in 1943 its case turned into an example of holiness, because this way the founder decided it personally. Zorzano was presented like the specimen of the holy engineer and, consequently, promoted as such from its death. For it they did relics with the sheets kept religiously because they had served to him as shroud and whose pieces and pieces the founder of the Opus Dei distributed between the first militants, when they went out abroad in the expansion of the Opus Dei to open new ministry fields. Its cause of beatification, initiated in 1948, remained nevertheless buried by its scarce relief, like so many other thousands of cases, in the Vatican.

Without any despondency, the Opus Dei continued its work canonizadora with other candidates and went so far as to be provided with a girl, Montserrat Grases, and between the masculine adolescents with Miguel Díaz of the Corral, dead persons both in "smell of holiness", which were proposed like models for the young followers, in the feminine and masculine branches respectively, inside the Opus Dei. Nevertheless, all these cases stopped being promoted before the possibility of a canonization accelerated in the person of the founding deceased of the Opus Dei, making use of the favorable political climate from 1978 after the election of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla like Supreme Pontiff with the name of Juan Pablo II. For a new ultra-catholic organization as the Opus Dei the holiness of the founder was going to mean the maximum authenticity guarantee and across her it was possible to demonstrate especially that the Work was predestined by God from its foundation.

This way, after its death in 1975, it did not turn out to be difficult to know the intentions of the Opus eiD with regard to the founder: to raise him to the altars as out and for the most rapid way. Since they needed five years for the legal introduction of the cause, the Opus Dei began mounting a few "historical offices" from 1975 to gather the information of which the members and sympathizers were arranging on the founder, enclosed one the most insignificant anecdotes, and all this was accumulating, properly expurgated, in what it happened to be named a Historical Record of the Founder, who remained centralized in the head office of the Opus Dei in Rome.

Also there was carried out, on the other hand, a monumental compilation of all the writings attributed to the founder and the sedicentes "unpublished writings" of the founder went so far as to reach the fabulous quantity of 62 bound volumes. In these preparatory works, before initiating the causes of consecration of the founder, there took part hundreds of numerary partners and numerary associates who gathered and "re-wrote" everything what was coming for internal route to the offices mounted to the effect, "cleaning" of doubtful or slightly favorable information everything relating to the biographical incident of Josemaría Escrivá.

In so intensive private canonization, the Opus Dei was acting of proper turbine in the process. The turbosantidad of the founder had to be carried out by force with a lot of hurry for the unspeakable fear that existed inside the Opus Dei to its own internal decline and the same disappearance of the founder was pushing them inexorably to it.

The campaign to the advantage of the holiness of the founder was accompanied of the publication of several "authorized" biographies, which more marked characteristic was the idolatrous cult to the founder. Such publications were offering an incomparable sample of this syrupy subliterary genre of the historical and emotional narrative named hagiography inside the catholic Church. An ancient numerary partner of the Opus Dei has indicated, referring to the hagiographers of the founder, who "praise, arrange, they interpret to its way (...) That They Remove and set with all serviceability, perhaps for the "freedom" that they think in the information cleanliness that earlier the directors have been in charge of obtaining".

The formal opening of the cause of beatification of Escrivá dates of February 19, 1981, five years and a few months after the death of the founder of the Opus Dei, respecting the minimal term established by the current canonical regulation. An official process of holiness initiated before the Church of Rome consists of two differentiated phases, first the beatification, with right to use the denomination of God's serf, and then the canonization that saint declares officially.

The process of beatification or the first phase in the Escrivá turbosantidad was going to begin in addition to form parallel to the authorization of the juridical statute of personal prelature for the Opus Dei. The records were moved to Madrid immediately after the opening of the process by the Vatican, they alleging like main reason that, although he had died in Rome, was in Spain where he had lived through more time.

The reforms realized in the Code of Canon law were going to favor the intensive plans that the Opus Dei had for the immediate canonization of its founder. The canon 2.050 of the Code was pointing out that "the holiness reputation must be spontaneous, not promoted by art or human diligence, originated from serious and honest persons", but this norm was replaced with other one that was omitting such conditions. Pope Juan Pablo II exhibited its intentions in the introduction to the appendix 1 of the reformed Code of Canon law on the Cause of the Saints. According to the Polish pope, "due to recent experiences it has been considered to be opportune to check this process form to simplify the norms, safeguarding naturally the soundness of the investigation."