Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

by Scott Hahn

Doubleday, 2006

176 pages, $19.95

Available in bookstores Sept. 26

In the wake of The Da Vinci Code book-and-movie craze, everyone seems to have an opinion on Opus Dei. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up this volume. I hoped not to find that Scott Hahn was cashing in on the cow — or worse, that Opus Dei was trotting out a popular member to do damage control to its reputation. Someone to serve as an “apologist” in the worst sense of the word.

After all, Hahn has written a succession of books about the Catholic faith, some of them quite personal and all of them brisk sellers. His audiotapes have done well, too. And he’s come this far without stressing, when mentioning at all, his longstanding connection to Opus Dei. Why come out with a book on this specific subject now?

I’m happy to report that, whatever Hahn’s motivation, the book stands on its own as a unique contribution to the life of the Catholic Church today. It would be just as interesting if the world had never heard of Dan Brown’s Code. This is classic Scott Hahn, complete with deep personal insights, theological precision, copious Scripture citations, irresistible enthusiasm and the familiar array of puns that keep both author and reader from taking themselves or their ideas too seriously. God has the last word.

In fact, The Da Vinci Code is never mentioned. Chapter 2, titled “The Secret of Opus Dei,” does not even refer to critics who charge that Opus Dei has a “secret agenda.” Rather, Hahn explains what the group’s founder, St. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, called Opus Dei’s spiritual foundation: divine filiation. The term means that every baptized person is a son or daughter of God, destined to share in his divine nature in heaven. Original sin, Hahn points out, was Adam and Eve’s rejection of God’s promise to raise them to this great status. By coming as a man, and dying and rising from the dead, the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ, opened again the way to divine filiation for all who follow him.

Hahn calls God’s plan of “divinization” or “deification” of man a “forgotten doctrine” that was a common teaching of the early Church but got lost in post-Reformation apologetics. St. Josemaría was one of the foremost proponents who brought the teaching back into the consciousness of Catholics, Hahn claims. He founded Opus Dei as a way for the average layman to exercise his baptismal dignity by bringing the faith into his daily life and converting the world through word, deed and example. In this, Hahn says, St. Josemaría anticipated the Second Vatican Council’s theme of the universal call to holiness.

“Our altar is our desktop, our workstation, the row we hoe, the ditch we dig, the diaper we change, the pot we stir, the bed we share with our spouse,” Hahn writes. “All of it is sanctified by our offering hands, which are Christ’s own. This doctrine is a particular emphasis of Opus Dei, but it is the property of the Church as a whole.”

The most surprising revelation of the book is that Opus Dei played a part in Hahn’s conversion from a Protestant minister to a Catholic evangelizer. When he tried to convert his wife, Kimberly, to the Catholic faith with lengthy doctrinal dissertations and Scriptural exegesis, it was an Opus Dei member who counseled him to “turn down the apologetics and turn up the romance.” Rather than seeing his wife as an object for conversion, he put more energy into fulfilling his own vocation of being a loving husband to his wife and father to their children. The result of his Opus Dei-inspired efforts can be read in an earlier book by Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Rome Sweet Home.

Stephen Vincent writes from

Wallingford, Connecticut.