The canonization of Josemaría Escrivá, a Spanish Catholic priest and the founder of Opus Dei, took place on October 6, 2002, by Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square, Vatican City.
During the canonization, there were 42 cardinals and 470 bishops from around the world, general superiors of many orders and religious congregations, and representatives of various Catholic groups.
(Messori 1997) During the days of the canonization event, Church officials commented on the universal reach and validity of the message of the founder, echoing John Paul II's decree Christifideles Omnes on Escrivá's virtues which said that "by inviting Christians to be united to God through their daily work, which is something men will have to do and find their dignity in as long as the world lasts, the timeliness of this message is destined to endure as an inexhaustible source of spiritual light, regardless of changing epochs and situations."
Kenneth L. Woodward, the longtime religion editor and senior writer for the American newsmagazine Newsweek, says that the ‘Devil’s advocate’ system was bypassed and witnesses hostile to Escrivá were not called.
[citation needed] However, Newsweek stated that two of the judges, Luigi De Magistris, deputy head of the Vatican's Apostolic Penitentiary, and Justo Fernández Alonso, rector of the Spanish National Church in Rome, did not approve the cause.
"[5] The journal Il Regno, published in Bologna by the congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart (the Dehonians), reproduced, in May 1992, the confidential vote of one of the judges in Escrivá's cause of beatification, in which the judge asks that the process be suspended and raises questions about the undue haste of the proceedings, the near absence of testimony from critics in the documentation gathered by the postulators, the failure of the documentation to properly address issues about Escrivá's relations with Francoist Spain and with other Catholic organizations, and suggestions from the official testimonies themselves that Escrivá lacked proper spiritual humility.
De Magistris became head of the Apostolic Penitentiary in 2001, an important position in the Vatican bureaucracy which normally is followed by elevation to the cardinalate, but he retired less than two years later and was made a cardinal only in 2015 by Pope Francis.
[5] Especially in the Third World, bishops were allegedly told that financial contributions from Opus Dei might be in jeopardy if they did not answer the request for positive testimony.
He says that the process was fast because first, Escrivá's figure is "of the universal importance;" second, the Postulators "knew what they were doing;" third, in 1983 the procedures were simplified in order to present "models who lived in a world like ours."
Similarly with Escriva, the pope's long track record of support and devotion...left no doubt where he wanted the process to end.