Salvador Bernal - Alvaro del Portillo

Introduction

In the early hours of March 23, 1994,Bishop Alvaro del Portillo, the Prelate of Opus Dei, died in Rome. I heard thenews a bit after nine in the morning and soon found myself drafting an articlewhich had to be sent to a newspaper in Madrid before five in the afternoon. Butdespite the pressure, my heart was filled with the same feelings I had had onJune 26, 1975, when Monsignor Josemara Escriv died. I was even writingsimilar words, as I found when I reread a column I had written back then,almost twenty years before, entitled "Changing Tears into Prayer."

"We cry when someone dies; we feel sorrow,our heart is grieved, and everything is filled with bitterness," SaintAugustine wrote in his Confessions. How well he knew thecontradictions of the human heart, and the powerlessness of created things tosatisfy its hunger for happiness. There were no better words to describe thepain I felt that morning in March. And it grew even sharper as the realizationbegan to sink in that I would never again see the lovable face of this man who,though worn out by a thousand battles, constantly lavished affection on peopleand never lost the youthfulness of love.

From 1976 to shortlybefore his death, I spent many hours at his side. With others, I spent manysummers with him, both at work and in times of recreation, far from his usualdaily round in Rome; and often I also went there, to the Eternal City, to workon projects he entrusted to me. And so, very soon after his death, I felt I just had to make the affable but strongcharacter of Alvaro del Portillo widely known. Especially since he had alwaystried his best to hide himself away, even to the point of disappearing behindthe founder of Opus Dei. He was indeed "a most faithful son and successorto Blessed Josemara," to borrow a phrase from the prayer approved by theVatican for private devotion to him.

In October 1976 my Profile of Monsignor Josemara Escriv waspublished, and this book has been widely read. Hence, in presenting now thisbook about Don Alvaro, I want my readers to understand that I am trying todescribe his personality primarily from memory, on the basis of my ownexperiences, though obviously I will have to mention other events and facts aswell. What I have to say is organized around important moments in Don Alvaro'sbiography, but it is particularly inspired and supported by episodes of which I myself was a witness.

I must give anotherwarning: These pages presuppose a certain knowledge of the history of Opus Deiand its founder. I have only included whatever details might be necessary toform a framework for my own impressions. Later on, if necessary and whenpossible, this memoir will be supplemented with further testimony in the form ofpublished books, documents, and so forth and with the autobiographical detailswhich crop up in the writings of Don Alvaro himself. But the latter, I feelsafe in predicting, will be few and far between. If he ever spoke abouthimself, it was just for the sake of a good laugh, or else because not doing sowould have made it more difficult to articulate exactly and faithfully aparticular trait of the founder. For there can be no doubt that the human andChristian virtue of fidelity, which in him was both innate and heroic, summedup the life of Alvaro del Portillo.

Furthermore, I havetried to keep in mind an idea I learned from him in August 1976, when hehimself was doing historical research. He wanted, he said, to reflect howMonsignor Escriv had lived the theological and moral virtues in crescendo, in the different stages of his life hereon earth. To achieve this, he believed, it would of course be very important tonarrate actual events. But one would also have to avoid the dangerespeciallyfor those who had come to Opus Dei only a short time before, or who had notknown the founder personallyof ending up giving just a series of anecdotes andnot an overall vision of his profoundly Christian vision and his deep sanctity.

Such care mustespecially be taken by anyone writing about Alvaro del Portillo, because hislife was imbued with that "charism of normality" which characterizesall those humble people who reach the summit of perfection without doinganything out of the ordinary. One night in 1985, at Solavieya, a conferencecenter in the Spanish province of Asturias, I jotted down in my diary thesewords: "Another day, all very ordinary, with that feeling ofserenityfilled with prayer and with workthat you always get when you're nearDon Alvaro." He was the very incarnation of the lay spirituality of OpusDei. So much so, in fact, that in his presence there came to mind these wordsfrom Blessed Josemara about the Blessed Virgin: "Mary sanctifies theordinary everyday thingswhat some people wrongly regard as unimportant andinsignificant: everyday work, looking after those closest to you, visits tofriends and relatives. What a blessed ordinariness, that can be so full of loveof God!" (Christ IsPassing By, no. 148).

When I think of DonAlvaro, there come to my mind some really paradoxical ideas: supernaturalnaturalness, everyday heroism, extraordinary normality. But I honestly dobelieve that his cooperation with the grace of God transformed the mostcommonplace, nondescript circumstances of everyday life into something holy, oreven divine. To borrow the words of Opus Dei's founder, he translated the proseof everyday life into heroic verse. He put beats and accents of eternity onordinary existence, even on the very smallest things. And he did everythingwith a deep humility which overflowed into meekness and self-forgetfulness.Once again we are faced with the paradoxical effect that men and women of Godhave on others. They try to hide themselves away so that only Jesus shinesforth (to borrow, again, the words of Blessed Josemara), and yet theirhumility speaks so loudly that many souls find the path to God by following thesound of it.