Alvaro Del Portillo:
The “Shadow” Steps into the Light
By K. V. Turley
Alvaro Del Portillo died in his sleep on March 23, 1994.
He would have preferred it that way: unnoticed, without fuss, and as ordinary an end to any man’s life as is possible.
It was a fitting conclusion to one who had spent all his life as an apostle of the sanctity of ordinariness, now giving witness to this even in the manner of his death. This was not the whole story, though, for only hours later the then reigning Supreme Pontiff, Pope John Paul II, knelt by the side of the dead prelate, not only to offer prayers for this departed soul, but, also, in testimony to the life of his friend. In these few hours we glimpse something of the paradox of the ordinary and the extraordinary summed up in this man soon to be pronounced blessed.
He was born in Madrid on March 11, 1914, the third of eight children to a lawyer father and his Mexican-born wife. They were as devout as they were happy, and it was in this atmosphere of security and faith that the young Alvaro grew. Family prayer and the sacramental life of the Church providing the natural flow to the childhood that was to follow. In fact, this naturalness was to become a defining characteristic of the boy, and later the man, something remarked upon till the day he died.
His choice of career was engineering. This required long years of study to which he applied himself fully, in the process becoming a model student, and yet largely remembered by contemporaries for being friendly and cheerful. With nothing in his personality or character to suggest otherwise, Del Portillo appeared destined for a “normal life” of professional and family responsibilities. Aged just 21, however, all of this was to change through an unexpected meeting.
The “meeting” had in a spiritual sense happened years previously. A young priest, then a chaplain to a Madrid hospital, had heard of the student from Del Portillo’s aunt. The priest had begun praying for him many years before they were to meet in the spring of 1935. The priest in question was Josemaria Escriva. Several years earlier in 1928, he had experienced a vision: it was of a vast number of people sanctifying themselves and the world in and through the ordinariness of their everyday lives, what would later come to be known as Opus Dei. And, it was this that the priest now communicated to the young engineering student. It was to be the most important encounter of Del Portillo’s life, changing it forever.
Soon after, Del Portillo had asked to join something that was still in practical terms embryonic, hardly visible. It was the personality of Escriva that was then the only clue to what Opus Dei was, and what for others it could be. It was not just a matter of personality, though, for what had been evident to the student from that first meeting was the personal holiness of this young priest. And, it was within this still forming spiritual entity, and the challenges that lay ahead for its founder, that Del Portillo saw his vocation almost immediately. From that moment, his life was to know only a burning desire to spread that call to the four corners of the globe.
One might expect that, from then on, the young Del Portillo’s life was to be one of retirement from the world, dealing with spiritual matters, a scholarly, even clerical existence. Far from it, for within months Spain was plunged headlong into what was to become a concerted attack on its ancient faith, before, partly in reaction, an equally vicious civil war broke out. Three years of fighting were to follow, during which Del Portillo was to become a fugitive in hiding, before eventually enlisting with the Republican Army and then crossing over at the Front to join with Nationalist forces. Thereafter, for a time, he worked with the engineering corps. Having only just escaped death’s grasp, he was barely 25 years when it ended, and, yet, had experienced more than many do in a lifetime. He had also seen, in all sorts of ways—none of which were good—how men were reduced by war. While convents burned and churches were desecrated, and frightened prisoners were shot to the sound of screaming planes descending to drop their deadly payloads upon fleeing civilians, the young Del Portillo, somehow, stayed faithful to his “cause,” that of the faith he professed and a vocation that had been revealed.
The paradox of war is that it can produce heroism as much as it does barbarism. The Spanish Civil War was to be no different. It was in this crucible that Opus Dei—barely a handful of men—was to be tested and made stronger. By the end of the war, with fresh impetus, he and Escriva, along with the others, were spreading their novel message of personal holiness throughout the, by now, neutral and isolated Spain. At the end of each working week, through cities and towns, Del Portillo was to travel, often at night on dilapidated trains, before meeting people he barely knew, to speak of something he was still coming to understand, and with a message more revolutionary than the slogans that had torn his country apart.
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