Church

A History, a Work, an Encounter

He spent a large part of his life in Argentina. In 1970, he realized that the Lord had given him the gift of healing. From that moment until his death, he devoted himself completely to serving the sick, building an aid structure in the province of Buenos Aires. Today, its work continues through the encounter of Mrs Perla with the Movement and AVSI

BY SILVINA PREMAT

He would get up at three in the morning, receive hundreds of visitors per day, and for almost a quarter of a century, inaugurated a new service every year at his Work in one of the poorest areas of the province of Buenos Aires. Still today, about 50,000 people rotate around the structure. Fr Mario Pantaleo, an impulsive Italian who answered the call for priests for Argentina in 1948, had discovered he had exceptional abilities for diagnosing and healing illnesses, and placed this wealth at the service of the most needy.

On August 19th, ten years after his death, the chapel containing his body was visited by more than 5,000 faithful, holding photos of ick family members in their hands, asking for his intercession. The exterior walls of the little house where he lived–now a museum–are covered with ex votos for grace received.

The house, chapel, and church make up the core of the Work of Father Mario, located 20 miles southeast of the city of Buenos Aires, in the Villa del Carmen quarter in Gonzàlez Catàn, where numerous services and social works are in operation, in a large area with buildings covering 20,000 square yards. The landscape was very different in the late 1960s, when Fr Pantaleo bought a small piece of land there–just a few houses in the midst of mud and bamboo, where he too built his own house. Fr Mario, who until the age of 12 had lived in his rich family’s palace in the Tuscan city of Pistoia, where he was born in 1915, chose a humble abode among those who possessed the least. “The whole Gospel is a parable of charity,” Fr Pantaleo said in a homily. “Christ obeys the Father and leaves the eternity of the heavens to embrace every creature, so that each of them may have his own heaven and a brother’s forgiveness, mercy, and warm hands. Charity is transformed in some way into the greatest grace that God has granted us. Practicing it transforms us into redeemers, together with Christ, of our brothers.”

An instrument of God’s decision
When Mario Pantaleo arrived in Argentina as a missionary priest, he already knew and loved this country, where he had lived between the ages of 12 and 19. In 1927, his parents had emigrated there with their four children, intending to rebuild the fortune they had lost during World War I and seeking a more favorable climate for Mario, who suffered from asthma. However, they were not successful in business, and the couple returned to Italy, leaving their children in a boarding school run by the Salesians in Cordoba. On his return to Italy, Mario entered the seminary in Arezzo and was ordained a priest in 1944.

This little man–he was just under five feet tall–who wrote philosophical essays and never stopped working, was chaplain in two hospitals in the province of Santa Fe. There, he began studying philosophy, and in 1960 decided to move to Buenos Aires to continue his studies (he received his university degree eleven years later). In the capital city, he was appointed chaplain of the Railway Hospital.

In the early 1970s, Fr Pantaleo, visiting a sick man to give him the sacrament of anointing of the sick, realized that he had the gift of healing. To everyone’s surprise, including Fr Mario’s, the dying man began to get better as soon as the priest laid his hands on him. The news spread rapidly, and Pantaleo was the object of all sorts of journalists’ comments, which irritated the bishops at first. “I am nothing but an instrument of God’s decision, of His healing power on earth,” Fr Mario would explain. In the beginning, he received the ill in the houses of wealthy families and would refuse any money for his servicio.

“For five years I had been suffering from a hemorrhaging cancer. I had been told I had three months to live. One day my husband, who was a physician, said there was a priest who healed,” recounts Mrs Perla, President of the Work of Father Mario. “I confess being totally skeptical, and what is more, somewhat irritated because I am a practicing Catholic and it bothered me that a priest would do these things. At the request of one of my children, I went to see him in the house of a family of landowners who were very well known in Buenos Aires, where he was receiving. In a room with no furniture, people were standing against the walls. I stayed to watch what he was doing: he would pass his hand over certain parts of the body without touching them. He would leave his hand motionless for a minute, then he rubbed it or something like that, and went on to the next one. With a cigarette in his hand, he came up to me and, without speaking, put his hand in front of my abdomen. How did he know the cancer was there? Still today, when I think about it, a sense of wonder wells up in me. I felt immediately that the blood was not flowing any more.” She never suffered from hemorrhages again, and never left Fr Mario’s side. She was his assistant and main collaborator in the building of the Work at Gonzàlez Catàn, where Pantaleo went whenever he could until, in 1976, he obtained permission from the Church to live and work there.

Thereafter, Fr Mario devoted himself completely to the service of the sick, from 7:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the afternoon–with a stop for lunch and a brief “siesta”–in a house that had been given to him in the center of Buenos Aires. He never took more than 7 or 8 days off a year, during which he would go to other countries of the world to visit friends who too were waiting for him with rows of sick people to be helped. He was persecuted by the police and by some medical doctors who accused him of practicing medicine without a degree. Stubborn and a fighter like few others, he returned to the university at the age of 63, and in two years earned a psychologist’s degree. On Sundays, in the same house where he received his patients, he would gather together with his young university classmates to study.

Those who know him say that it was very unlikely he would hesitate in front of the apparent impossibility of achieving some desire. Evidence of this is his meeting with Pope John Paul II. Moved by the Holy See’s authorization to dedicate the church of Gonzàlez Catàn to the Pilgrim Christ–a name that did not exist in the liturgical calendar–he wanted to thank the Pope in person, and went to Rome in 1979. In the midst of the crowd in St Peter’s Square, he asked a Swiss Guard for permission to hand a gift that he had brought from Argentina personally to the Holy Father when he passed the point where he was standing. Impossible for security reasons, said the guard. Fr Mario, looking at him, asked him about the problem with his knee that caused him a great deal of pain, which the guard had not mentioned. Pantaleo laid his hands over him and alleviated his suffering. Then he repeated his request, and that morning, when the Popemobile passed next to him, it stopped and Fr Mario was allowed to climb up long enough to embrace the Pope and give him the gift.

At the service of the needy
As thanks for the results of his cures, Fr Mario received every type of gift (art works, clothes, food), which he sold or gave to the poor, until his friends persuaded him to accept money for the construction of the church and the assistance projects that he wanted so much. In this way, in three months he was able to buy the land for the church, and other buildings rose rapidly: a nursery school, a kindergarten, an elementary and secondary school, a workshop for people with handicaps, a clinic, a home for the elderly, and a sports center.

The activity of the Work of Father Mario has changed the face of the Villa del Carmen quarter, where 120,000 people live, over half of whom suffer the conditions of unemployment, the lack of water, electricity, and gas, and grave hardships in satisfying their most basic needs. Education (from nursery school to the para-university level) is offered to 2,600 students; the clinic treats more than 30,000 patients per year; almost 200 handicapped and 70 elderly people are given assistance in their respective centers; and more than 7,000 young people practice various sports here.

“Fr Mario was not too worried about himself, but all his time was devoted to the Work and the people who went to him to ask for aid for their body and their spirit,” says Mrs Perla, who was at his side in his last and greatest concern: to seek aid for continuing his work after he was gone. Together they visited congregations and foundations in Argentina and abroad. They even went to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who realized there was a difficulty, which was their stress on offering education. “My sisters are illiterate,” she said apologetically.

Guided by the “Attraction”
Pantaleo died in 1992 without finding the support he sought. He left Perla in charge of the Work and she, who at Fr Mario’s death felt she had lost her “compass and alphabet,” remained for two years without knowing quite what to do, until she resumed looking for an experience that could foster loyalty to the ideal for which the Work was born.

“Knowing about my concern, Eleonora, a woman in Communion and Liberation, in April 2001 invited me to the presentation of a book by Msgr Giussani in Buenos Aires with the Archbishop,” Perla recounts. She was greatly struck by what was said about the Movement, and immediately after the presentation, she approached Cardinal Bergoglio and told him of her intention to make contact with this Movement. The Cardinal encouraged her in this direction, and she started “investigating what CL was.” In June, she obtained an audience with John Paul II and told him, too, about her intention. A series of meetings began that ended up in two AVSI projects for alleviating the poverty of families and young people and for long-distance adoptions, both of which are already operative.

Perla’s next desire was to meet Fr Giussani. Last October, she was invited to give a lecture at the Banca Interamericana di Sviluppo in Milan. She went, even though her doctors advised against it, because she thought it was her chance to meet Fr Giussani. And that is just what happened. “It was a moving encounter, which reminded me of the moment when I met Fr Mario,” Perla said. She confessed, at the age of 76, that in this way “I was given the opportunities to fall in love with CL. And here I am, completely in love with all of you, in love with life because finally I have found some rest after this terrible search that has filled my time recently.”

Fr Mario’s work, begun by a man who placed himself at the service of the poor and sick, now continues in the sequela to a human sympathy that multiplies the ties of friendship.