All of God

Publish date 18-12-2020

by Rosanna Tabasso

In the Rule of the Fraternity, our friend and father Dom Luciano Mendes de Almeida is present on every page, from the first to the last line.
He illustrated each page with the stroke of his pencil, immediate and essential; but it is not only this that makes him the protagonist. He is present at the beginning of the Rule, when Ernesto says he asked him to write it so that it was immediately "canonical" but Dom Luciano that time, and perhaps for the only time in his life, answered him no because - he said - «The founder writes the rule. The Lord has given you the gift of this charism "; but that's not why the rule belongs to him. The real reason is that we shared and we share the same vision of Christianity: we saw it live by him and perhaps he recognized the same desire in us. And this intimate and profound communion has always accompanied us and still accompanies us.

Dom Luciano was all Christian, without gray areas, he was all of God and in the same way all of the people: he was of every person who approached him and at the same time of all humanity, of all creation. He had an eye for detail and at the same time universal, open to 360 °. It was all charity. Without rhetoric, we saw in him the charity of which St. Paul says "all believe, all hope, all endure" (1 Cor 13: 7).

The synthesis of his life is the synthesis of our Rule: Beloved we love. Somehow he summed it up in the few lines he wrote in Ernesto's diary a few days before his death, on August 27, 2006. Ernesto had gone to San Paolo to see him because he had got worse, had very strong pains and was struggling to speak. In the brief meeting, in the hospital room where he was hospitalized, Ernesto told him that we were all praying for the miracle of his healing, that if God wanted he could heal him, that he would ask for it too. Dom Luciano obeyed - I don't know if to reassure us or because he really believed in it - but his answer in any case led us to look far beyond his person: «God is good and Father. I entrust myself to him, to Our Lady and I ask - if God's will - the miracle for Dom Vicoso through Our Lady ». Dom Antonio Vicente Ferreira Viçoso had been bishop of Mariana, diocese of dom Luciano, since 1844 and died in 1875 in the concept of holiness. The cause of his beatification was firm and Dom Luciano had placed himself at his disposal for the miracle that was missing ... Until the last, not for himself but for another, even if already in Heaven.

Dom Luciano was like this in every aspect of his life. Since we met him on January 15, 1988.
until the moment before dying. And it is not rhetoric. "God is good and Father" was the synthesis of his unshakable faith, it was the reason for his always hoping and the foundation on which his choice to always love, to be also "good and father", like God.
In the Rule we share with Dom Luciano the choice to always seek goodness - "goodness is disarming" is the heart of the Arsenals -, goodness as a mode of dialogue, as the final decision of every possible choice, as a goal to be achieved in our personal life and in the life of the fraternity.

Dom Luciano testified to us with his life as a man and as a shepherd the dimension of fatherhood and motherhood. His tenderness, his attention to even more concrete and everyday aspects of people's lives communicated a closeness that opened the heart and spoke of God without the need for words. But he was also a spiritual father capable of accompanying people in the interior life, capable of opening them to God's mercy with the firmness of a life completely adhering to the Gospel. He accompanied his spiritual children in discernment with a fidelity that truly made God feel close, God who never abandons anyone, God always with us.

Now the diocese of Mariana and all of us are following the cause of his beatification.
For us he is already a saint, a saint of daily life and of goodness always and in any case. We already pray to him like this, a saint who is our father in faith, a saint who lived our Rule with us. A holy model of holiness for all of us. I don't know if we will see him on the altars… If I know him well first he will ask that all those who have been waiting for some time pass by, Dom Viçoso in the lead. Dom Luciano is like that.

Rosanna Tabasso
NP October 2020

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