608. November 27, Grandfather's Death

Meditations no. 535 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Our Father learned to live the Christian virtues in the Grandparents’ home.

Honour your father by word and deed, that a blessing from him may come upon you. Today is the anniversary of the Grandfather’s death. Filial gratitude moves us to remember him with special affection, since God made use of him, together with the Grandmother, to give life to and bring up our beloved founder.

He was born at Fonz, a village near Barbastro in the province of Huesca, on October 15th 1867. He died at Logroño on November 27th 1924, four years before the founding of Opus Dei, and thus did not live to see God’s special plan for his son. His entire life was an unselfish service used by God’s providence to prepare our Father for the mission that was in store for him.

The Grandparents’ home was the good earth that made it possible for our Father to respond generously to God’s call. As our Father once told us, our Lord so prepared things that I had a normal, ordinary life, without anything exceptional.

He wanted me to be born in a Christian home like others of my land and to have exemplary parents who practised a living faith. Ever since I was a boy they taught me to have great freedom, while at the same time looking after me carefully. They gave me a Christian upbringing. I received it more from them than in school, though at the age of three they took me to a nuns school and at seven to a school run by religious brothers.

The Grandparents instilled in our Father a deep respect for freedom and taught him to employ it well. They never imposed their will on me, he would say. They would let me have only a little money, very little, but I was free to use it as I liked. The deeply Christian sense of life that they imparted to their children included an authentic piety and a great love for truth, simplicity and naturalness.

Our Father received from the Grandfather a constant example of industriousness. He saw him work untiringly, day after day, in the small business that he owned in Barbastro. At the same time the Grandfather tried lovingly to take spiritual and material care of the family that God gave him and to foster the Christian formation of those around him. He worked cheerfully and incessantly. Among the Grandfather’s traits, our Father remembers his concern for the welfare of those who worked for him. Every year he would organize retreats and Lenten conferences for them. He especially recalls his father’s understanding and charity for everyone. For example, he gave many alms and gifts to the nuns in Barbastro. When our Father speaks about these things he usually sums them up by saying, He was a very generous almsgiver.

The Grandfather also taught our Father to bear life’s large and small adversities calmly, without becoming impatient or losing his good humour. I never remember seeing him with an angry expression. I always remember him as calm and cheerful. Yet he died worn out when he was only fifty-seven years old. He died worn out, but he was always smiling. This way of acting, the result of Christian piety, has also been our Father’s when facing the difficulties that God has not spared the Work. To be quiet, to pray, to work and to smile: this is an entire programme of supernatural life that we, his children, also want to practise.

The Grandfather’s fortitude was a model for our Father’s fortitude and perseverance.

We read in Scripture, God sets a father in honour over his children, God wanted to render great honour to the Grandfather by multiplying his posterity in a universal family with ties stronger than blood. Although the Grandfather did not live to know that his son would be the foundation stone of this new ark of the covenant to which would come people of many nations, races and tongues, by his ordinary life he greatly contributed to making the Work of God a reality. For he prepared very well the instrument that God had entrusted to his care.

Providence demanded a lot from the Grandparents. They knew how to surrender themselves generously and unselfishly to the divine will. Without complaint they bore all the trials life sent them. Thus the Holy Spirit prepared a home for our Father which was a school of Christian life.

He told us, I have always made those around me suffer a lot. It’s not that I’ve provoked catastrophes, but (forgive me, Lord) in order to form me I was like a nail that with every blow it received a hundred fell on the horse-shoe. I looked upon my father as Job personified. My parents lost three daughters, one after another in consecutive years, and they also lost their fortune. I experienced the cruelty of my little schoolmates, because children have either no heart or no head, or perhaps lack both… .

My father carried on, in a heroic way, after falling victim, as I now realize, of a textbook case of illness caused by inordinate stress and worry. He had to care for two children and my mother; he forced himself to be strong, and did not forgo any humiliation that would help us to get by in a dignified way. And he could have had an outstanding position for those days, if he hadn’t been a Christian and a gentleman, as they say in my country… .

I saw him suffer cheerfully, without showing his suffering. I saw a courage that was a lesson to me. For afterwards I have so often felt as though the ground were slipping away and the sky falling on top of me, as though I were about to be crushed between two iron plates.

All of it was God’s providence. Opus Dei was to be born in the most thorough poverty without any earthly support. My father was totally ruined. When God wanted me to begin working in Opus Dei I had neither virtue nor money. All I had was the grace of God and good humour. Do you see how good it all was? Now I love my father more, and I thank God that his business did not go well; that way I know what poverty is. Otherwise, I would never have known. I have a holy pride. I love my father with all my heart, and I believe that he is very high in heaven. For he knew how to bear the humiliation of being penniless in such a dignified, such a marvellous, such a Christian manner.

Our gratitude to the Grandfather for his contribution to the birth of the Work.

The Grandfather’s marvellous generosity in facing financial difficulties and other adversities in life remained deeply engraved in our Father’s heart. Once he told us, My father was a marvellous person. He bore life’s adversity with a deep Christian peace, like a gentleman. Jesus, hidden in the Sacred Host, thank you for letting my father’s business go so poorly, since thus I could know poverty. I ask that you bless my children and that everything always go well for them. But if adversity ever befalls them, may they go to the tabernacle and to holy Mary to seek the power and strength to keep on going.

Within the generosity, affection and fortitude of his family setting, our Father began to sense that God was calling him to something special. First came the gentle intimation that stirred his innermost being, the premonition of divine love that he first felt when he was fifteen or sixteen years old. Our Father recalled, I had never thought of becoming a priest or of giving myself to God. I hadn’t even considered it because I thought it wasn’t for me. But God was preparing things, giving me one grace after another while overlooking my defects, the errors of my childhood and the errors of my adolescent years.

The Grandfather was always docile to God’s will. When his son opened his heart to him, he generously respected and loved the path that God was asking of him. Our Father often declared that I owe my vocation to him, since he accepted and aided our Father’s decision to give himself to God in the priesthood. Recalling that moment, our Father told us: One day, I told my father that I wanted to become a priest. It was the only time that I ever saw him cry. He had other plans, but he didn’t rebel against my decision. He answered me, “My son, think about it carefully. Priests must be very holy. It is very hard not to have a home or a family, not to have a love on earth. Think about it a bit more. But I won’t oppose you.” Then he brought me to speak to a priest friend of his, the abbot of the collegiate church of Logroño.

However, God did not allow the Grandfather the happiness of seeing his son ordained. Our Lord chose to call him a few days after our Father received the subdiaconate, four months before being ordained to the priesthood at Saragossa. He went to heaven, after having finished his work on earth, when our Father was already definitively embarked on the priestly path that would culminate in the founding of the Work.

Today, on the anniversary of his death, we ask him to intercede for the family of the Work that he helped so much to form, along with the Grandmother. Benedictio patris firmat domos filiorum. A father’s blessing strengthens his children’s house. The Grandparents watch over us from heaven. Their care and affection is a treasure blessed by God. It will fill our hearts in times of joy and of sorrow, strengthening the conviction, so essential to our vocation, that we are a family where no one can suffer alone.

In finishing our prayer, we remember that the feast of our Lady of the Miraculous Medal is celebrated today in some places. The Grandfather had great devotion to this Marian advocation. Just moments before he died his eyes rested on her image. We also can never forget that on this day in 1982 the establishment of Opus Dei as a personal Prelature was announced, a caress our Mother wanted to give us on one of her feast days.