Opus Dei: Towards Highly Regulated Autonomy

It was by connecting to the digital information portal of the Holy See on August 8, that some 90,000 lay people and 2,000 priests who are members of Opus Dei learned of the canonical modification affecting their institute.

An evolution that is not a revolution in itself, because it is part of another decree – Ad charisma tuendam, promulgated in July 2022 – one of the effects of which is to transfer the supervision of personal prelatures from the Dicastery for Bishops to the Dicastery for the Clergy. This is a way of emphasizing the idea that a prelature is foremost a group of clerics, and thus more strictly delimiting the authority of the general prelate who is at its head.

For the record, by personal prelature, they mean a particular type of ecclesiastical circumscription that appeared in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, supposed to make it possible to carry out particular pastoral tasks that “overflow” the borders of a single diocese. Also, the personal prelature has the particularity that it is not circumscribed to a territory like the dioceses.

The August 8 decree marks a particular insistence on a precise point, which is not in itself a novelty. While the cleric who is a member of a personal prelature is positioned under the jurisdiction of his prelate, the lay people who collaborate in the apostolate of the institute remain, for their part, always subject to the authority of the diocesan bishop in whose territory they live.

Technically, this is what the reference to Canon 107, now inscribed in the text of Canon 296, means. In the current context, many commentators see, through these new Roman provisions, a lessening of the legal autonomy of Opus Dei: “The Pope abolishes the privileges of Opus Dei,” as the headline in the Spanish daily El Pais stated.

In fact, it is especially about a clarification made in order to avoid an interpretation deemed legally to be too broad, as may have happened in the past: that of considering the prelate as a “super-bishop” indiscriminately exercising, in the same manner and without local control, his jurisdiction over all the members of the prelature, whether clerics or laity.

Another unmistakable sign, the July 2022 decree stipulates that the prelate general of Opus Dei, being no longer vested with the episcopate, cannot wear its insignia: the rank of “apostolic protonotary” is only granted with the title of “Reverend Monsignor.” 

Following this papal intervention, on August 11, Fernando Ocariz – the priest currently at the head of Opus Dei – published a press release in which he declared that he welcomes “with sincere filial obedience the provisions of the Holy Father” and he asks the members of the prelature to “remain united in this attitude.”

Beyond this desire for appeasement, it is hard to imagine a similar Roman clarification taking place under the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. History remembers that the latter had placed Opus Dei at the heart of the Vatican apparatus, effectively granting it unprecedented autonomy.

But in the Tiber much water has since flowed under the bridges, and the heirs of Escriva de Balaguer – the founder of the Work raised upon the altars by the Polish Pope – now make the bitter observation that the Tarpeian rock is still as close to the Capitol as in the days of the old Romans.