By Dr. Scott Hahn
When I was a Protestant, I harbored a familiar prejudice -- that Catholics didn’t know the Bible and didn’t much care to know it. Of course, I now know that isn’t true and it’s never been true.
But back then, when I was taking my first halting steps toward the Church, I had to learn the truth slowly. I learned it in a very ordinary way -- from two Catholic friends I met while studying at Marquette University. One was a dentist, the other a political philosopher. Both of them used to tuck a small copy of the New Testament in their back pockets. At odd moments during the day, I’d see them just sitting and reading the Scriptures.
They were my introduction to “Opus Dei” (“the Work of God), a personal prelature of about 85,000 Catholics -- mostly ordinary lay people -- founded in the late 1920s by St. Josemaria Escriva.
Finding Opus Dei was great news for me. Here I met ordinary Catholics, from all walks of life, striving, with God’s grace, to become holy, to become saints. And with the help of Opus Dei, I learned first hand that Scripture is at the heart of Catholic spirituality and the heart of their daily life.
St. Josemaria insisted that members spend time each day reading the Scriptures. Daily Scripture reading was one of their “norms of piety” -- along with such things as saying the rosary, attending daily Mass, and going to confession regularly.
I found a rich trove of biblical insights in the writings and homilies of St. Josemaria. So many of the ideas that I had “in seed” as a Protestant pastor and Bible scholar, I found already flourishing in the garden of the Catholic Church. In my studies, I had come to see that “divine filiation” -- God’s loving plan to make us His sons and daughters and to share in Christ’s sonship -- was at the heart of the Scriptures. Yet decades earlier, St. Josemaria had declared this to be the heart of Opus Dei.
St. Josemaria and Opus Dei have had a profound influence on my work, and my calling as a member of Opus Dei has helped me to help so many others. That’s why I’ve devoted my latest book to the subject. Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei (Doubleday, $20), sounds like a memoir. But it’s more than that. It’s a study of the rich biblical theology and biblical spirituality that lies at the heart of the Opus Dei.
It’s this spirituality that I found at the heart of the Church -- a faith in the power of the Word to enter our souls and transform us. As St. Josemaria taught, we want people to say of us: “This man reads the life of Jesus Christ.”
November 2006
Archive of short reflections from Dr. Scott Hahn on the mission of the St. Paul Center.
