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Biography

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José Luis Múzquiz de Miguel, known in English-speaking countries as Joseph Muzquiz, was born on 14 October 1912 in Badajoz, in Extremadura, Spain. He received a Catholic upbringing and went to Madrid to study civil engineering at the Escuela de Ingenieros de Caminos. While a student and young engineer in the Spanish capital he encountered Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, whose teaching held that ordinary work and the circumstances of daily life could be a path to holiness. Muzquiz asked for admission to Opus Dei in January 1940 and became one of the earliest members of what was then a very small group. For a time he continued to practice as a civil engineer while living that spirituality as a layman.

On 25 June 1944, in Madrid, Bishop Leopoldo Eijo y Garay ordained Muzquiz to the priesthood together with Álvaro del Portillo and José María Hernández Garnica. The three were the first priests of Opus Dei. After ordination he remained in Spain, taking part in the internal formation and early expansion of the institution and pursuing further ecclesiastical studies. He later obtained a doctorate in canon law. His priesthood belonged to the secular clergy of Opus Dei rather than to a traditional religious order: Opus Dei is a personal prelature, and its priests are secular priests who serve the spiritual needs of members and of people reached by its apostolate.

In 1949 Escrivá sent Muzquiz to the United States, together with the physicist Salvador Ferigle, to begin Opus Dei’s work in North America. They settled first in Chicago and opened the first Opus Dei center in the country. Muzquiz was the first priest of Opus Dei to reside and work in the United States. The beginnings were modest: a small residence, contact with university students and professional people, and the slow communication of a spirituality then little known in the English-speaking Catholic world. Over subsequent decades he helped extend that work to other American cities, preaching retreats, hearing confessions, giving spiritual direction, and supporting the establishment of residences and centers. Those who knew him described a priest of simplicity, cheerfulness, and steady pastoral availability, without personal prominence.

He died of a heart attack on 21 June 1983 in the Boston area of Massachusetts, at the age of seventy, after more than thirty years of priesthood spent largely in the United States. In 2011 the Archdiocese of Boston opened the diocesan phase of his cause of canonization, and he is therefore styled Servant of God. He has not been beatified or canonized, and no universal feast day or official patronage has been assigned to him. Historical interest in his life centers on his place among the first priests of Opus Dei and on his role in transplanting that institution from Spain to the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

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