"Give me a man of prayer and he will be capable of anything." The line, attributed to St. Vincent de Paul, captures well the life of a priest who resolved to give himself entirely to society's most needy in the year 1625. The Vincentian Fathers, also known as the Lazarists — and, later, together with St. Louise de Marillac, the Daughters of Charity — were born from that decision.
Four centuries on, that missionary spirit continues to spread across the world, echoing Christ's preferential love for the poor. And, providentially, that same spirit also affected St. Josemaría's path.
Barbastro: First Lessons in the Faith
The first encounter took place in Barbastro, St. Josemaría's hometown. There, a Daughter of Charity, Bl. María del Rosario Ciércoles, taught catechism to him and to his sister Carmen.
It was from her that young Josemaría learned the first rudiments of the Christian faith. Years later, during the Spanish Civil War, Sister María del Rosario would give her life as a martyr.
Zaragoza and the Miraculous Medal
The paths of these two saints would cross again in Zaragoza. St. Josemaría trained at the Seminary of San Carlos, in the very city where, more than three hundred years earlier, St. Vincent de Paul had completed his own priestly formation.
In the Escrivá household, devotion to our Lady of the Miraculous Medal (a devotion the Vincentian Fathers had helped spread) was simply part of daily life. St. Josemaría visited the chapel on the Rue du Bac in Paris on several occasions, entrusting himself to our Lady's protection.
Madrid, October 2, 1928
The most significant encounter of all came in Madrid. On October 2, 1928, St. Josemaría was making a retreat at the Vincentian Fathers' house, next to the Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. It was there, during those days of prayer, that he saw Opus Dei.
In this way, the founding of the Work remained forever tied to a Vincentian place; a house for priests who, like their founder, made prayer the starting point of everything.
A "Little Part" of the Church
St. Josemaría liked to say that Opus Dei is "a little part of the Church," born within a living Church where the holiness of others — St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louise de Marillac, and so many men and women who have followed in their footsteps in every continent — had already prepared the ground.
That is why, on the road to its first centenary, the Work looks with gratitude on these saints whose paths crossed with that of its founder. In the catechism lessons of Barbastro, in the classrooms of Zaragoza, before our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, and during that retreat in 1928, God was weaving together a story in which the charity of a seventeenth-century French saint prepared the way — without his ever knowing it — for a new message: holiness in the middle of the world.