Opus Dei

The sacrament of Holy Orders confers a participation in Christ’s priesthood. The ministerial priesthood is essentially distinct from the common priesthood of the faithful.

“God himself is the author of marriage.” The intimate conjugal union between a man and a woman is sacred, and is structured according to laws established by the Creator and independent of human choice.

God created us with the great gift of freedom. The natural law has the force of law as the voice and interpreter of the 'higher reason' of the divine Lawgiver.

Grace “is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1999).

A new doctrinal outline in the "Summaries of Catholic Teaching" series. Many people have found these helpful for getting to know the Catholic faith better and explaining it to others.

Personal sin is an “action, word or desire contrary to the eternal law."

Christ taught that to be saved we must carry out the commandments, which express the core of the natural moral law. The first commandment is twofold: love for God and love for neighbor out of love for God.

Opus Dei has around 90,000 members, both men and women. 98% are laypeople, most of whom are married. The remaining 2% are priests.

The seventh commandment forbids unjustly taking or keeping the goods of one’s neighbor and wronging him in any way with respect to his goods.

"If we pray the Our Father sincerely, we leave individualism behind, because the love that we receive frees us from it. The ‘our’ at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, like the ‘us’ of the last four petitions, excludes no one."