the witnesses

My Work?
It’s the Lord’s
Parish priest in Paraguay, missionary for almost 20 years, he will be amongst the protagonists of the Rimini Meeting. Here is his history, full of certainty

by Roberto Fontolan

The last time he was among the crowds at the Rimini Meeting, in 2005, Fr. Aldo seemed rather lost. He never expected so many people, so many requests, so many handshakes, questions and invitations for meetings. Then, between one sigh and another, in that hoarse voice with the Venetian inflection, he told me he wanted to get back to Paraguay, “to go home.” A nemesis: that tiny, run down South American country which has stolen his heart from the Dolomites of his infancy and of his family, a place where the heat overcomes the cold, disorder overcomes order, and sloth overcomes desire. A nemesis, because, for many years, Paraguay was a difficult land, arid like the Chaco, the semi-desert that extends east from Asunción, inhabited by small tribes and scattered communities of Mennonites (perhaps related to the Amish of Pennsylvania), and where the greatest warmth was, for a long time, that of the implacable sun.

Nothing else is needed
A few months earlier, I was in his office in San Rafael Parish, in Asunción. We were talking, and were continually interrupted by a procession of people who, with rather embarrassed and very affectionate gestures, handed over what they had brought: a young man his first salary, an old woman her small savings hidden under the mattress, some children a few coins saved up. I was astounded at the life of that parish–the people, the volunteers, the quantity and variety of charitable works, of cultural and missionary works. These works include the school, the Literary Café, the pizzeria, the Life Support Center, the clinic, the Medical Care Program, the distribution of food and clothing, and then, the pearl: the clinic for terminal patients. I asked him how he managed for money. He answered, quoting Alessandro Manzoni: “Providence.” When someone answers you like this, you metaphorically raise your eyes to heaven and think, “Providence is fine, but then… Let’s see the papers, the programs, the fundraising, and the banks.” I pushed him to be concrete. He answered, “Listen, if I go to bed at night worrying about a debt that is due tomorrow and this takes me away from Christ, then it is really a temptation; it’s the devil who is at work. If this work is mine, then it’s right that it should fail and come to an end; if it is the Lord’s work, then it will go on, you can be sure of it. Providence does not put in order what I do, but uses me for His work in the world.” Thus, talking in a small room in Asunción, it became clear to me that while many of us get agitated so as to get what we want and if we don’t get it we pepper God with prayers or recriminations, there are those who firmly believe that there is nothing in our life that is our own, that everything is His, and that nothing else is needed.
He told me that one day they brought a dying child to the parish. This was because of the fame of the St. Richard Pampuri Clinic, but the clinic, as well run and as clean as a hospital in Stockholm, is unable to accommodate children. For the time being, thinks Fr. Aldo, because a few days later, he launches an appeal to his parishioners to buy an adjoining piece of land–which, just by chance, is up for sale–so as to build another section for terminal patients who are children. No need to say that things went so fast that the ward was ready and opened ahead of schedule. In the meantime, the Bethlehem Stable was opened, a place where orphans and abandoned children are welcomed and accommodated. At the moment, there are 15 of them between the ages of 2 months and 11 years.
Programs without programming, plans without planning…. Is it possible?

“Happy Christianity”
Fr. Aldo, his surname is Trento, is from a small town in the Italian province of Belluno. He has been in Paraguay for almost 20 years, from that fateful year 1989, when the dictator Alfred Stroesser gave up power after 35 years, leaving the country on its knees, with the economy in need of reinvention and society annihilated. Chaos was reigning everywhere.
It was in that year that Fr. Giussani asked him to go on mission to Paraguay. And rather like Matthew seems to be saying in Caravaggio’s picture, Aldo answered “Who, me? Are you sure?”
He was not convinced, not at ease. His story and his soul were full of torments. A post-conciliar revolutionary, in old-fashioned terms we could call him a “protestor.” As an “angry young man,” he ended up teaching in a school in Battipaglia in southern Italy, where an exchange of words with a group of GS students led him to question himself radically on the almost-lost meaning of a vocation.
Aldo went back north, to a high school in Feltre, and joined up with the students of GS at the time of the great political battles in Italy, a time of leaflets, meetings, and demonstrations. He rediscovered his task, but his unease and torment had not left him, and he found himself in deep crisis. Then came Fr. Giussani’s invitation to the mission. Aldo vacillated (though it had been an ideal of his at one time): I am not ready, I’m not worthy, I’m not able. Fr. Giussani told him that he was sure of him, because, in spite of everything, Aldo had never doubted his vocation as a priest, and he asked Fr. Massimo Camisasca to accept him into the St. Charles’ Missionary Fraternity. So it was that one day he found himself at Milan’s Linate Airport, accompanied by Fr. Giussani, who was seeing him off and told him to find inspiration in the 16th-century Jesuits and their “reductions” (missions). Aldo thought, “What an idea!”
Then, after citing Manzoni, we have to look to Hollywood, to the spectacular film, Mission, which popularized the story of that hitherto neglected but extraordinary adventure. I could not help referring to Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons when I told people about San Rafael Parish. On the wave of Fr. Giussani’s slogan (“reformulate that experience”), Fr. Aldo has become a scholar of “Happy Christianity,” to use the celebrated expression of Ludovico Antonio Muratori. The parish’s small publishing house (they’ve even got that!) produces biographies of the Jesuits and historical texts, many of them written for children. One day, we went to visit the great ruins of Santa Trinidad, the reduction that he likes most (it lasted only a short time, 50 years). As he touched the huge red stones, admiring the hydraulic genius of the builders, examining the statues of the angel-musicians, Aldo told us about the great Jesuits, Ruiz de Montoya and Antonio Sepp. That history, the history of that Christianity, had become his history.
It didn’t happen at once. For years, in the grip of a melancholy that would not leave him, Aldo saw nothing in Paraguay but heat and dust, interminable trips on derelict  buses, people who cheated him, and insomnia–that mood, that sense of exhaustion, that implacable sky recounted by Graham Greene in The Power and the Glory. Fr. Aldo was not alone, but he could not beat the loneliness inside him. But then something changed. In 1999, the parish priest of San Rafael, who was also an Italian from the St. Charles’ Fraternity, had to go back to Italy for health reasons. That left Aldo really alone, but the trauma of the new and totally unforeseen responsibility reawakened him from that sense of isolation.
Fr. Massimo Camisasca recalls, “Bernanos writes that an enterprise needs to fail completely, and it is only in that moment that it is truly born. For Fr. Aldo, this is what happened. When he had no one around him, when I was on the point of closing our mission in Paraguay, he began to look at his life, at his mission, and at the people around him in a new way.”
Looking at life with new eyes, Fr. Aldo wrote in a letter, “I accepted the trial with happiness, as a gift through which God was asking everything of me–really everything. I managed to keep on my feet only because I lived those moments on my knees before Him.”
Today the San Rafael “reduction” appears to be an original city parish, thanks to that patchwork style of architecture that somehow ends up harmonious. At one end, there is what looks like a medieval castle, complete with battlements; in the gardens, there are wooden shacks; and, at the front, the Church is surrounded by flower beds.

“God chooses the ignorant”
Every morning, two hundred primary school children swarm into the courtyard, while at the other end work goes on so as to provide up to 50 places in the clinic. The day-clinic is already active by early morning (15,000 people were treated in 2002) and food and clothing is being given out. It’s the same on the Padre Pio farm, where cows are reared and AIDS patients are cared for, and in the financial cooperative, which operates a micro-credit system. In the evening, the tables of the pizzeria are filled, providing work for eight people and making a small profit. If you pass by St. Rafael on Monday, you will meet Fr. Paolino Buscaroli in front of the Café Van Gogh. He was in Chile, and was sent by the St. Charles’ Fraternity to Asunción. He is there to set up “Literary Mondays,” conferences and debates on topics that range from Dante to Isabella of Castile. Tuesdays and Wednesdays you will find him editing the Observador, a weekly insert in the daily paper Ultima Hora, which the editor himself asked for; he is often in disagreement, but he has understood that there is something interesting for Paraguay going on in the parish, and not only the works, but even the thought that supports them, a judgment that is useful and responsible, offered to everyone.
A good number of people work at St. Rafael and hundreds of volunteers are involved as well. There is a lawyer who takes care of the accounts, a manager who does the plumbing jobs, a financier who coordinates the catechesis, and a housewife who takes care of the sick. But everything, Fr. Aldo insists, is born from the true Parish Priest, the Lord Himself, prayed to and loved incessantly in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. Believe him when it seems he is exaggerating: “It’s got nothing to do with me. God chooses idiots and the ignorant to achieve what He wants. He chooses sinners. He came into this world to work and God’s work is in forgiving me and embracing me.” He said this on June 2nd at the Italian Embassy in Asunción, at a reception in his honor because President Napolitano named him “Cavaliere della Stella della Solidarietà” (Knight of the Solidarity Star), with “the right to wear the Order’s insignia.” How his name came to be presented at the Quirinal (Presidential) Palace is a mystery as fine as the Paraguayan sky, so blue and so near.