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September 7, 1931 in Madrid: anniversary of a divine locution

Andrés Vázquez de Prada

Tags: Contemplation, Faith, Opus Dei
“Et fui tecum in omnibus ubicumque ambulasti!” (2 Sam 7:9) – “and I have been with you wherever you went.”

From the beginning, our Lord showed the founder of Opus Dei a design that was universal in scope, and catholic by nature. During the summer of 1931, great tribulations engulfed him. Our Lord used them to purify his affections and bring him to a total abandonment to Divine Providence, although external circumstances were in themselves calamitous. Despite everything, he did not hang back and wait for a more propitious time. The mission entrusted to him urged him on. Looking back later on those years when the Lord had put pressure on him to live exclusively by faith, he testified to the Lord’s assistance:

The first steps, to tell the truth, were not at all easy. But the Lord, as often as necessary – and I’m not talking about miracles, but about the ordinary way that our Father in heaven deals with his children, when they are contemplative souls – in every instance came to our rescue and gave us a supernatural fortitude… Around the year 1931 he made this locution clearly heard, not just once but a number of times: Et fui tecum in omnibus ubicumque ambulasti (2 Sam 7:9) – I have been with you and will be with you wherever you go!

That locution was entered in his journal on September 8, 1931, the feast of the Birth of the Virgin Mary:

Yesterday, at three in the afternoon, I went to the sanctuary of the church of the Foundation to pray for a little while in front of the Blessed Sacrament. I didn’t feel like it, but I stayed there, like a dummy. Sometimes, coming to, I thought, “Now you see, good Jesus, that if I am here, it is for you, to please you.” Nothing. My imagination ran wild, far from my body and my will, just as a faithful dog, stretched out at the feet of his master, sleeps dreaming of running around and of hunting and of friends (dogs like himself), and gets fidgety and barks softly… but without leaving his master. That’s how I was, exactly like that dog, when I noticed that, without meaning to, I was repeating some Latin words which I had never paid any attention to and had no reason to recall. Even now, to remember them, I have to read them from the sheet of paper I always carry in my pocket for writing down what God wants (…). The words of Scripture that I found on my lips were, Et fui tecum in omnibus ubicumque ambulasti, firmans regnum tuum in aeternum (“And I have been with you everywhere, wherever you went…; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam 7:9, 16). Repeating them slowly, I applied my mind to their meaning. And later, yesterday evening and again today, when I read them again (for – I repeat – as if God were taking pains to prove to me that they were his, I can’t recall them from one moment to the next), I well understood that Christ Jesus was telling me, for our consolation, that “the Work of God will be with him everywhere, affirming the reign of Jesus Christ forever.”

These divine words confirmed the Work’s universal and perennial character, in the service of the Church – the uninterrupted continuity of its mission. Strengthened by this locution, the founder wrote on January 9, 1932, to all members of Opus Dei (the few there were then, and the immense multitude he expected later), with absolute supernatural faith in that divine enterprise: “Have complete confidence, then, that the Work will always fulfill its mission with divine effectiveness; that it will always serve the purpose for which the Lord has wished it to exist on earth. By God’s grace it will be, for all centuries to come, a marvelous instrument for the glory of God. Sit gloria Domini in aeternum! – May the glory of the Lord endure for ever!”

In the face of the almost revolutionary upheaval all around him, the founder stressed to his followers the Work’s supernatural origin, helping them see that this was no temporary institution or apostolic organization brought about as a response to the religious persecution in Spain at that time. The Work had not come to answer the need of a moment and then disappear once political and social peace was restored.

The echo of the locution of September 7 was still reverberating in his soul when, on the fourteenth of the same month, our Lord showed him the path that the Work’s perpetuity would take: that of an identification of its members with Jesus in humiliation and on the Cross. The entry for that date reads: “Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 1931: How much today’s epistle cheered me up! In it the Holy Spirit, through Saint Paul, teaches us the secret of immortality and glory… This is the sure path: through humiliation, to the cross; and from the cross, with Christ, to the immortal glory of the Father.”


Extracts from A. Vazquez de Prada, The Founder of Opus Dei: the life of Josemaría Escrivá, vol. 1: The Early Years, Princeton, NJ: Scepter Publishers, 2001, Chapter 6, pp. 290-293.

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