Romana

Cuenca is a small Spanish city where, in 1934, the founder of Opus Dei had Consideraciones Espirituales printed, the first version of the book that, corrected and expanded, a few years later would become The Way. On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of this event, a round table discussion was organized in the city on June 25, with the participation of Bishop José María Yanguas of Cuenca, Fr. Lluís Clavell Ortiz-Repiso, president of the Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, and Fr. José Carlos Martín de la Hoz, director of the Office for the Causes of Saints of the Prelature of Opus Dei in Spain. The following day, the feast of St. Josemaría, a portrait of the saint was blessed in the parish of St. Esteban Protomartyr.

The round table discussion highlighted the circumstances that led St. Josemaría to visit the city of Cuenca on several occasions in the 1930s to meet with the bishop, Blessed Cruz Laplana, a relative of his mother.

The painting of St. Josemaría in the centrally located church of San Esteban Protomártir is the work of the Cuenca painter Pedro Romero Sequí. It was blessed by Bishop José María Yanguas after the Mass in honor of the founder of Opus Dei on his feast day. A plaque commemorating the 90th anniversary of the publication of Consideraciones Espirituales was placed next to it.

Huelva, a provincial capital in southwestern Spain, also has a new painting of St. Josemaría for the worship of the faithful. It was blessed on October 6.

The parish of St. Teresa of Jesus, where the painting has been placed, is located in the neighborhood of La Orden, where since the late 1970s there has been a square dedicated to St. Josemaría. In the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows, next to that of St. Teresa of Jesus, Fr. Manuel López Vega (1923-2019), a member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, who founded several cooperatives to help solve the problems of substandard housing in the area, was parish priest for many years. A serious economic crisis caused him great difficulties at a time when he was embarking on a project to build two hundred and eighty-eight houses: the workers couldn’t be paid, most of the cooperative members pulled out, and the few who remained demanded their housing or their money. Given the insolvency of the cooperative, repeated requests to extend the loan that a bank had granted were ignored. In that dramatic situation, Fr. Manuel, together with several parishioners, entrusted himself for nine days to the founder of Opus Dei, who had died recently. At the end of the novena a letter arrived from the bank that had denied the loan extension, saying that after reconsidering the matter, it had decided to grant the request. The situation was saved, the houses were finished and the cooperative once again had many members. Shortly afterwards the square was dedicated to St. Josemaría.

The painting that has now been placed in the parish of St. Teresa de Jesús is the work of Manuel Higueras, a hyperrealist painter and, during the 2023-2024 academic year, a collaborator in the pastoral ministry of that parish as a seminarian.