Josemaría EscriváAlso at the beginning of the twentieth century, a Spanish priest named
Josemaría Escrivá (unknown at the time but now a Catholic saint) founded
an institution called Opus Dei that was dedicated to a truly Catholic concep-
tion of secularity and Christian humanism. His central idea was the sanctifi-
cation of everyday work and family life, discovering the hidden years of Jesus
in Nazareth as the paradigm of a normal Christian life. This required a notion
of positive inclusive secularity: the world is good because it comes out of God’s
hands. Our sins alone mar it. Therefore, all Christian men and women are
universally called to sanctity in the middle of the world without having to leave
their‘professional vocation’; they possess a common priesthood based on
baptism alone which they should exercise with a lay mentality. Escrivá did
not deny the existence of religious vocations to an order or the priesthood, but
he did deny their exclusive claim to holiness. He fully accepted the sacrament
of order but assigned apostolic responsibility to all Christians. Remarkably, he
developed this perspective in the traditionalist Catholic environment of
Spain. It was not designed in theory but originated in the practice of Opus
Dei, the institution he had founded.^8 All of this later became general teaching
of the Second Vatican Council, but at the beginning it was taken for a
Protestant notion.
The Limits of Neo-Scholastic Social EthicsBefore discussing the Second Vatican Council and its momentous importance
for Christian humanism, we must briefly consider the limits of neo-scholastic
social ethics. As has already been stated, at its introduction neo-scholastic
social thought, as taught by Tapparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862) for instance,
offered the church a unique instrument to propose an alternative that was
neither liberalism nor traditionalism. However, in time, it became an obs-
tacle to understanding and receiving the pragmatic ideals that make political
and economic liberalism the most successful experiment of social history.
Thomism alone was not sufficient, as Thomas had no conception of a
modern state and an industrialized economy. Let us refer to two of the
relevant problems.
First, Cardinal Bellarmin had defined the church as a‘perfect society’.^9 This
is true if understood in the sense that Jacques Maritain gave it: a society that
is perfect with respect to the specific properties or requirements of the idea
(^8) SeeConversations with Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer(Dublin: Ecclesia Press, 1972).
(^9) See Robert Bellarmine,On Temporal and Spiritual Authority, ed. Stefania Tutino (Indian-
apolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2012), 269–77.
A Catholic Concept of Christian Humanism 201