Adolfo Rodríguez Vidal

Adolfo Rodríguez Vidal was a Spanish Roman Catholic prelate of the twentieth century, born in Zaragoza, in Aragon, on 13 November 1920. He was ordained a priest on 25 June 1944. He belonged to Opus Dei, a personal prelature of the Catholic Church, and was therefore a secular priest rather than a member of a religious institute bound by public vows. His priesthood coincided with the decades in which Opus Dei, founded in Spain by Josemaría Escrivá, was establishing apostolic work in Latin America, and a substantial part of Rodríguez Vidal’s ministry was spent in Chile rather than in his native country.

In 1964 he was appointed bishop of Santa María de Los Ángeles, a Chilean diocese erected in 1959 with its see in the city of Los Ángeles in the Biobío region of south-central Chile. He received episcopal consecration on 8 September 1964. Because the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) was still in session when he became a bishop, he was able to take part in its later periods. He then governed the diocese for more than two decades, from 1964 until 1988. That span covered the local application of conciliar liturgical and pastoral reforms, the organization of clergy and parishes in a relatively young diocese, and ordinary episcopal ministry through Chile’s political and social upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, including the years of military government.

Rodríguez Vidal resigned the see on 13 February 1988, after reaching the age at which diocesan bishops are asked to offer their resignation, and was thereafter bishop emeritus of Santa María de Los Ángeles. In later life he returned to Spain. He died in Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, on 13 September 2003, at the age of eighty-two.

He has not been beatified or canonized. The Catholic Church has not assigned him a feast day, and no official patronages of places, causes, professions, or groups are attached to his name. Publicly verifiable information about him consists chiefly of the dates and offices of his career rather than a large body of published personal writings or a popular cultus. He remains of historical interest as a Zaragoza-born priest of Opus Dei who became a long-serving residential bishop in Chile and who died at Compostela in 2003.