Rimini Meeting
Father Aldo Trento, Missionary in Paraguay

THE WORLD CHANGES IF YOU LET
YOURSELF BE LOVED BY CHRIST

I would like to start with something Father Giussani told us many years ago, and that moved me at the time: “I wish you will never be at rest.”
Instead of talking to you about our work, I wrote something in homage to Father Giussani, because he is my life: there is him, there is God and him, behind all you can see or read. He told me, “Father Aldo, I have decided to send you to Paraguay.” I objected: “I am going through a severe bout of depression and you want to send me on a mission?” He looked at me with the same tender gaze with which Jesus stared at the young rich man, at Zaccheus, at Mary Magdalene, and at Matthew, and told me: “I am sending you because only now do I feel certain about you.” But what happened to me before? What led me to that point?
When I was seven, I felt the calling to give myself completely to Jesus. On July 28, 1958, I left my family and I hitched a ride on a tractor to the seminary. Those were difficult, beautiful, and angry years; in 1971, I was ordained a priest. I belonged totally to Christ, but dissatisfaction and the desire for a new world led me to become a Potere Operaio sympathizer [Workers’ Power was a radical left-wing Italian political group, active between 1968 and 1973].
One day, four kids changed my life. I had taken part in organizing a strike against Vietnam imperialism, and those four kids told me, “Professor, this is not the way to go about changing the world. The world changes if you do; and you change if you let yourself be loved by Christ.” The possibility of a new existence dawned on the horizon of my life.
One can love, one can be a father only if he is loved in the first place. Everything that has been brought into life and created by God exists so that I can be to everybody what Father Giussani has been to me: a companion. So, when I saw a cadaver on the street for the first time, I picked it up, I took it home with me, and I cleaned it. Suffering is truly a grace that allows you to be happy, because it allows you to love and to live virginity, which is the real vocation of man: the fullness of the “I.” At the age of 62, I am a happy man, as I live the beginning of a fulfillment that makes me look at death with serenity. In four years, I have stood by the side of more than five hundred dying people, all of them with a smile on their lips. I have become a father to dozens of abandoned children: I put them to bed at night, I pick them up in the morning, and I take them to school. I thank you, and I ask you to pray for me.