Today, June 26, is the memorial of Saint Josemaría Escrivá.
Founder of Opus Dei.
Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás was born in 1902 in Aragon, Spain.
In his youth, he already felt that God was calling him for a special mission. The sign came to him: Josemaría saw the bare footprints left in the snow by a monk. The sight moved him, and kindled a desire for religious vocation.
After attending a spiritual retreat that left him on fire for the love of God, Josemaría founded Opus Dei in Madrid on October 2, 1928. The act would blaze a trail in the Catholic Church: it gave the faithful a new way to sanctify themselves in the middle of a busy world through their work and fulfillment of their personal, family, and social duties.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the late 1930s, religious persecution became the new normal. Josemaría was forced into hiding, and he ministered to his parishioners in secret.
On February 14, 1943 he founded the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, united to Opus Dei. In the mid-1940s he developed a serious form of diabetes, from which he was miraculously cured in 1954.
He died in 1975 after suddenly collapsing in his work room, an apparent heart attack. Pope St. John Paul II beatified him in 1992 and canonized him in 2002.