Word: dei
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Total Effort. Opus Dei (official title: Sociedad Sacerdotal de la Santa Cruz y del Opus Dei) was founded in Madrid on Oct. 2, 1928. The founder was a young Marist priest, José María Escrivá de Balaguer, whose aim was to tie the struggle for spiritual perfection to the struggle for professional perfection in the modern world. Instead of retiring into monasteries, he felt, men with a secular calling as well as a sacred one should be able to follow both at once. The solution: in addition to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, a man pledges...
...years Opus Dei inched ahead, an unofficial studying and worshiping commune of men who used old houses in Madrid as headquarters. They were in one of these on the city's outskirts when Spain's Civil War broke out, pinning them down in the line of fire between attacking Loyalists and Nationalists defending a barracks. After a two-day battle the Loyalists won; the Opus Deists slipped out of the house (Father Escrivá in worker's coveralls...
After the Civil War the new movement found itself opposed by ultra-conservative Spanish Catholicism as well as by the Jesuits, but in 1947 Pope Pius XII gave Opus Dei official recognition, and the group established headquarters in Rome...
Total Freedom. Today there are more than 200 houses of Opus Dei throughout the world, with four classes of membership. Top class is called Numeraries-an estimated 7,000 members of the professions (both priests and laymen), who take full vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Most of them live and study together, contribute all their income above bare subsistence to Opus Dei. The second class: Oblates, some 12,000 intellectuals, workers and peasants, who must take the vow of chastity but do not have to take the others. The next class: Supernumeraries, some 25,000, whose vows are conditional...
...headquarters of Opus Dei is in Chicago, with other leading branches in Washington, D.C., Boston and Madison, Wis. U.S. membership is still small-not more than 200. In some quarters Opus Dei is believed to be a chosen instrument for liberalizing the reactionary Spanish church and possibly even the Franco regime itself. Members heatedly deny any political role, but admit their strong liberal leanings. Said one Opus Dei priest in the U.S. last week: "We did not like the idea in Spain that all higher learning must be government-approved and government-controlled. So four years...