A Treasure for the Church:
St. Josemaría on Marriage,
Family & Education.
Madonna M Murphy.
Scepter Publishers, 2026. 170 pages.
ISBN: 9781594175695
I have had the privilege of being in the presence of a few saints – Saint Teresa of Calcutta during her last visit to Ireland in the early 1990s, as one in a million with St John Paul II in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1979, and twice in 1972 at get-togethers with St Josemaría Escrivá. In all those situations there was something extra special – something divine. The holiness of the saint was palpable. I hardly believed that those three would, rightly, be raised to the altars in my lifetime, but such is the case.
During his first meeting with Pope St Paul VI after the death in 1975 of St Josemaría almost a year earlier, the Pope, who had known and admired St Josemaría since the 1940s, told Fr (later Bishop) Álvaro del Portillo, his long-time collaborator and first successor at the head of Opus Dei, that St Josemaría’s work and teachings were “a treasure for the whole Church” and should not be regarded just as something for members and co-operators of Opus Dei to cherish and value.
Providentially, Fr Álvaro had managed to persuade an initially reluctant St Josemaría to allow himself to be filmed at large get-togethers, first in Spain and Portugal in autumn 1972 and later in several Latin American countries in 1974 and 1975. I believe his logic was something along the lines of: “What will the people who come after us think of us if we don’t leave them some evidence of your time among us?” Thankfully, there are now dozens of filmed get-togethers which for decades have been shown at small and large gatherings and are now freely available on YouTube.
What Madonna Murphy has done is to group the videos under the themes covered. While the get-togethers essentially covered the questions asked by those attending, St Josemaría’s answers always seemed to touch a chord with his interlocutors, in some cases someone recently bereaved or coping with some other difficult personal circumstance. More often than not, the takeaways from the videos are the sense that the Holy Spirit was speaking through this saintly man in a most encouraging, and at all times good-humoured, fashion. If you haven’t seen one of these videos, go look at one – if you have, you’ll know what I mean.
The book is made up of ten chapters, each covering a general theme such as the role of parents in their children’s schools, raising virtuous children, bright and cheerful homes, and more, following the path to the cities he visited, starting in Pamplona in Spain in 1972. The first five chapters deal with his catechetical journey to Spain in October and November of that year, while the remaining ones cover his catechesis in South and Central America in 1974 and 1975. To the huge disappointment of many in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Guatemala, a combination of exhaustion, bronchial troubles, and altitude sickness caused his stay in those countries, and his ability to attend large get-togethers, to be curtailed.
Part of the rationale of the catechetical journeys was the crisis in the Church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. St Josemaría wanted to help confirm the faith of the members of Opus Dei and their friends and co-operators and to give encouragement to the many initiatives being fostered by them. While I look forward to eventually receiving a soft copy of the book, an advantage of getting an online review copy is that it is easy to click links allowing one to jump between text and YouTube videos – hours of happy and inspiring viewing await one.
I just can’t recommend this book highly enough!