Fernando first met Opus Dei when he was in high school. A friend invited him to a center of the Work, where he was immediately drawn in by the atmosphere he found there: “Everything was very pious, very work-focused, very much about growth.” Shortly after, he asked to become a numerary member of Opus Dei.
After graduating from university, Fernando went to work at a brokerage firm. “Why am I a stockbroker?” he asks. “For love of God.” Fernando saw his work as the natural setting in which to share a Christian sense of life with others. Many of his colleagues went on to build Christian families and homes, “not thanks to me, but thanks to the Work. They saw the example of a man in finance who was devoted to God.” During his eleven years in Opus Dei, Fernando gradually discovered the joy of aspiring to holiness and striving for Heaven, even in the midst of difficulties and hardships.
One day, Fernando received word that he was to leave the Work. “It was a strange thing. They told me they had given me a yellow card, what they called an admonition.” The reason he was given was that he had not followed the established protocol when speaking with people from the Church’s hierarchy. Then they told him that he had a received second admonition and that it would be best for him to leave the Work. “That,” Fernando recalls, “was a terrible disappointment for me.” Nevertheless, thanks in large part to his wife — who he married a few years after leaving the Work — Fernando stayed close to God.
Some time later, Fernando moved to Miami. There, he was surprised to run into Víctor, the friend who had first invited him to an Opus Dei center. And he was even more surprised to learn that Víctor had been ordained a priest some years before. “Friendship moves mountains,” Fernando says. “That friendship was so pure, so good... And that’s where I got to know God again, to start fresh with the Work again, to fall in love with the Work all over again.”
I got to know God again, to start fresh with the Work again, to fall in love with the Work all over again.
They were very close friends: “We told each other everything,” Fernando says, and if people heard laughter coming from the confessional, they knew it was because Fernando was going to confession with his friend. “I started doing apostolate again, and I fell in love with the Work all over again.” Fernando says that although things had been clouded somewhat by the pain of what he had been through, “the love of apostolate, prayer, and spiritual direction were still there, and I really can’t live without those things.”
After seven years in Miami, Fernando went back to Mexico. “But thanks to finding that friend from the Work and telling him what had happened,” Fernando recalls, “he arranged for a small investigation into what had happened to me.” Shortly after, a director of the Work in Mexico reached out to Fernando to speak with him and offer him an institutional apology. “The director who asked my forgiveness told me that they had investigated — or rather, reviewed — my case, and that they were deeply sorry for what had been done to me,” says Fernando. “And I am grateful for that, truly grateful.”
Today, Fernando lives with his family in Mexico City and continues to take part in formation activities organized by the Work. “From the moment I joined Opus Dei, I truly fell in love with the spirit of the Work,” he says. “To this day, after all these years, I am still in love with it.”