The founder of Opus Dei had a certain ‘struggle’ regarding his surname from a very young age. As detailed in the study, Blessed Álvaro del Portillo, first successor of Saint Josemaría, recalled how Escrivá himself said that “he would blush as a child when he heard about the scribes and Pharisees” because many wrote his surname with b and not with vsince its pronunciation in Spain is generally the same.
The young José María Escrivá “found this confusion annoying, especially because of the negative connotations that the memory of the scribes of the Gospel has,” to the point that around 1928 he began to write his surname with a capital V following a recommendation. of his father, according to a note by the saint himself in 1935: “It was my father (who is in Heaven) who ordered me not to tolerate the b in last name.”
Escrivá, in any case, continued to create certain confusions, especially during his stay in Madrid in the 1930s, before the outbreak of the Civil War. When he established the DYA Academy, the first corporate apostolate activity of Opus Dei, Lawyer Francisco Escrivá de Romaní lived in the same building, which caused numerous mistakes and disruptions with the mail.
After the war, in 1940, the three brothers, Carmen José María and Santiago Escrivá Albás, presented a request in court to change their surname in accordance with the law so that it was “Escrivá de Balaguer”, in reference to the town in Lleida where they are from. originally the Escrivá.