A life with trapeiros

A few months ago, following his death, the Hélder Câmara Center issued a statement: «It is impossible to say goodbye to Tenderini. A strength like his does not end with the arrival of death. He has faced the horrors of the dictatorship up close. He embraced social justice. He has dedicated his life to people and the protection of rights. A legacy that will never be forgotten."

The protagonist of this story is called Luis Tenderini. A native of Premana (Valsassina) in 1968 he left for Teresina, northeastern Brazil, to study theology at the Jesuits. He learns that a PIME missionary from his own country is working in the State of São Paulo. He joined him and employed himself as a labourer: "The 'sail' of my life - he would later recount - gradually stretched out more and more: I was able to define with more clarity and determination the goal of a life inserted in the context of a popular Church , in the spirit of Vatican II". This same life - in the meantime he married a Brazilian - later took him to Recife, still in the north-east, where he became a close collaborator of his great bishop, Dom Helder Camara. They share a passion for justice and the defense of the poor, Luis will pay the consequences severely, when in 1989 he is kidnapped and tortured by death squads. For the latter he created the Brazilian section of the Emmaus Movement founded in the 1950s in France by the abbé Pierre. Until his death he devoted himself body and soul to the poor trapeiros, the country's ragmen. In them Luis had glimpsed the possibility of carrying out the mission indicated by Dom Helder: «To fight with all one's strength so that the dignity of the human person is respected throughout the world; destroy the social structures that generate oppression, exclusion and misery; bear witness to the Gospel of universal fraternity because we are all children of the same Father".


Annamaria Gobbato
NP October 2022