Opus Dei

The Christian life is our life as children of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. The action of the Holy Spirit in the Christian’s soul, besides giving sanctifying grace and the theological virtues, communicates inspirations and actual graces, and has a specific manifestation that the Church calls the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Decalogue contains a set of serious duties, but it is also and above all an instruction, a teaching on how to live.

Our prayer involves every aspect of our life. The Catechism distinguishes between vocal prayer, meditation and contemplative prayer. All three have a fundamental feature in common: the recollection of the heart. Prayer is not optional for the spiritual life, but rather a vital necessity.

With the prayer of the Our Father, Jesus wants to make his disciples aware of their condition as children of God. An important consequence of the sense of our divine filiation is filial trust and abandonment in God’s hands. The Our Father is the model of all prayer: not only do we ask for everything we can rightly desire, but also according to the order in which it should be desired.

The Holy Mass makes present, in the Church’s daily liturgical life, the one sacrifice of our redemption. The Mass is a true and proper sacrifice because it makes sacramentally present the one, perfect and definitive sacrifice of the Cross. The faithful can and should participate in the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice. The desire to receive Holy Communion should always be present in Christians: what food produces in the body for the good of physical life, the Eucharist produces in the soul.

The Statutes of Opus Dei were promulgated by Pope St John Paul II in 1982. Written in Latin, they define precisely the juridical configuration of the Prelature, its organization, and its aims.

In his 5 October general audience, Pope Francis continued his cycle of catechesis on spiritual discernment, speaking about self-knowledge and "passwords" in the spiritual life.

Penance is a sacrament which brings healing and salvation from sin. Over the course of history, the ministers of Christ and the Church have exercised the power to forgive sins in different ways. At the same time, in this sacrament the Church has maintained a fundamental structure which is made up of two equally essential elements: the action of the person who experiences conversion under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and the action of God which occurs through the ministry of the Church.

The ninth and tenth commandments refer to internal acts corresponding to sins against the sixth and seventh commandments. Internal sins can deform the conscience. The struggle against internal sins is part of the Christian’s endeavour to love with all one’s heart, mind and strength. Purity of heart means having a holy way of feeling.

Baptism incorporates the person who receives it into the Life, Death and Resurrection of Christ and into his saving action. This sacrament leaves in the Christian an indelible spiritual seal of belonging to Christ. Through Confirmation, Christians participate more fully in Christ’s mission and in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. A baptised and confirmed Christian is destined to take part in the Church’s mission of evangelising by virtue of these two sacraments.

All men and women are called to participate in God’s creative power by perfecting the world through their work. They should also cease working on the seventh day, to dedicate it to divine worship and rest. Sunday is sanctified primarily by participating in Holy Mass. The Church establishes this obligation so that her children do not lack the essential nourishment they need to live as children of God.