Opus Dei priest is 100 years old today: faith has led me to fall in love with the Catholic Church, my mother

Fr. Emilio Palafox Marqués turns 100 today, 74 of them being a priest. San Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, asked him to go to Mexico, from where he shares that faith has led him to fall in love with the Catholic Church, which his mother considers.

P. Palafox was born in Granada (Spain) on July 12, 1925 in a Catholic family, who taught him the Christian faith.

Being young, when he was a student in Valencia, he met Opus Dei, who was getting more and more known in the Samaniego residence, “a small and cheerful university mansion,” as the Website of the workas their members call this institution.

There, on June 15, 1941, he decided to say “yes” to God.

He obtained a doctorate in Natural Sciences (Biology) and shared the first steps of Opus Dei outside Madrid, closely seeing the progress of Opus Dei in Spain, by the hand of his Holy Founder.

San Josemaría himself called him to Rome and proposed to travel to Mexico to fulfill his mission as a priest of the Lord.

On July 1, 1951, 74 years ago, he was ordained a priest and, a month later he started heading to Mexico. He was the second priest of the work to reach the Latin American country, shortly after Fr. Pedro Casciaro.

In 1977, he arrived in Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, where he continues until today active and available, always with a smile.

Faith “has led me to fall in love with the Catholic Church, my mother”

In November 2015, when he was 90 years old, he granted an interview to the Mexican media The impartialin which he remembered his history, his work and different milestones in his life.

“I go mainly to the spiritual direction of laity, men and women, young and not so young who want to know more thoroughly and practice their Catholic faith more intensely,” he shared then.

When asked about how he sees the Church, the priest of Opus Dei said that he saw her “with the affection of a child of the Church. I am Catholic for a family. And then for the formation I had to study the dogmatic and moral and biblical and canonical theology thoroughly to receive the priesthood.”

“And knowing leads to love. My knowledge of the Catholic faith for the priesthood and the experience of that faith has taken me to – I can say so – to fall in love with the Catholic Church, my mother the Holy Catholic Church,” he said.

P. Palafox then stressed that “what our Catholic Church needs us believers is the deepest fidelity, and of non -believers I would say that respect. The Catholic Church in the world is so respectable, what it is doing.”

What do you recommend to live attached to the principles of God?

The priest responded like this: “The Gospel, the life of Christ. If one approaches a little to what he said and what he did, he falls in love with that style of living and thinking. That is contained in the gospels.”

Then, “reading, applying to life itself the evangelical texts is known to Christ and feels so close to the truth preached by him and taught by the Church.”