Josemaria Escriva, a young diocesan priest in Madrid, founded Opus Dei on October 2, 1928. He later described the founding as answering a vocation he had come to understand over the preceding years: that ordinary work and everyday life, not only the cloister or the priesthood, could be a genuine path to holiness. The phrase Opus Dei, Latin for the Work of God, reflects that claim directly. Where earlier movements had generally asked the laity to imitate monastic practice, Escriva's message was that a bricklayer, a homemaker, a student or a civil servant could sanctify the ordinary tasks of their own state in life without leaving it.
The first members were a small circle of students and professionals gathered around Escriva in Madrid. Through the 1930s the group survived the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War, during which Escriva crossed the Pyrenees on foot to reach Republican-held territory, and by the 1940s the association had begun spreading beyond Spain, first to Portugal and then across Western Europe and the Americas. In 1950 the Holy See recognized Opus Dei as a secular institute, a canonical category for lay Catholics living a consecrated life while remaining in secular professions.
Escriva led Opus Dei until his death in Rome in 1975. He was beatified in 1992 and canonized in 2002, one of the fastest canonizations in modern Catholic history and a mark of how far the movement he began in a Madrid side street had grown within the Church he served. Its mission today, as stated by the prelature itself, remains the one Escriva articulated at its founding: spreading the universal call to holiness through the sanctification of ordinary work.