Jack Valero heads the Office of Communication of Opus Dei in the United Kingdom and has just published a book of testimonies, El Opus Dei sin filtros. Vida Nueva, which interviewed him this week, asked him about those within the Work who see a degradation in the revision of the statutes initiated by Francis. He prefers to call it “a canonical adjustment so that the charism may be lived better in today’s Church.” A numerary says so. Valero is a layman and celibate, and according to the Code of Canon Law, as it stood in August 2023, he is no longer a member of the Opus Dei prelature, but a layman who cooperates with it by agreement.
Canon 294 has established since 1983 that personal prelatures are composed of priests and deacons of the secular clergy. In August 2023 Francis rewrote the two following canons. Since then the prelature is assimilated to public clerical associations, and its prelate is a moderator with the faculties of an Ordinary. Laypeople may devote themselves to its apostolic works through agreements, while canon 107 remains intact, which gives them the bishop of their domicile as their Ordinary. The motu proprio entered into force on the very day of its publication and carries the standard clause, the one that makes it prevail over any contrary provision, even over those that would merit special mention.
The Work clings to its 1982 statutes, which define Opus Dei as a prelature comprising “both clerics and laypeople” and place its faithful under the authority of the prelate. Francis ordered them to be adapted in 2022 and they remain unadapted. But the Code itself establishes that a universal law does not derogate particular law unless it expressly says so, and that is precisely what that final clause states. The 1982 statutes remain valid insofar as they do not contradict the new canons, and what made the laypeople members of the prelature is exactly what contradicts them.
The new statutes, which according to canon 296 must establish how the laypeople cooperate, were delivered in Rome on June 11, 2025. In February, as the prelature itself announced, Leo XIV told Ocáriz that they were still under study and that no publication date could be foreseen. Thus the laypeople of Opus Dei have been outside the prelature for more than two years and without the statute that should regulate their relationship with it.
According to its own figures, Opus Dei has some 94,000 members, of whom just over 2,100 are priests. If the Code is applied, the prelature is formed by those priests, and the rest, almost 98 %, are laypeople with an agreement. A year ago this newspaper headlined “Opus Dei, on the verge of ceasing to exist” the report on some statutes that would divide the Work into three entities, with the priests in the prelature and the laypeople, including numeraries, in a separate association of the faithful. Those statutes would do nothing more than put in writing what the Code already says.
In the interview Valero explains what Opus Dei is, and he does so with a precision that does not suit him. He recalls that the founder said that “whether you are a man or a woman, married or celibate, priest or layperson, we all have the same vocation.” And he adds that the institution dreamed of by St. Josemaría is one in which everyone is “on the same level,” without “some higher or lower than others.” The Code has drawn the line precisely between the priest and the layperson, with the former inside the prelature and the latter cooperating from outside, and if that is not putting some higher and others lower, it comes very close. The prelature’s website continues to say that all its faithful “are and feel themselves to be members to the same degree.” Feeling so, of course, they can.
As a precedent, Valero recalls that St. Josemaría accepted “with great joy” that the Work should become a secular institute. The founder told it differently in the letter with which he requested permission from the Holy See for the special congress of 1969, where he wrote that to obtain the 1947 approval “its original spirit had to be forced.” The Work took thirty-five years to reach the 1982 prelature, the formula that finally brought priests and laypeople together under the same regime. It is that formula that the Code has dismantled.
And as proof that Francis did not want to attack the Work, Valero cites the beatifications of Álvaro del Portillo and Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri, whom he presents as “members of the Work.” Del Portillo, who was the first prelate, was a priest. Guadalupe was a numerary, a laywoman like Valero himself, so under today’s Code only one of his two examples would count as a member of the prelature.
Valero assures that in the Work they are “very calm.” He has been outside the prelature since August 2023 without having noticed it, which must be what he understands by a canonical adjustment.
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