The international Claretian family concluded on December 31, 2024, the commemoration of the 120th anniversary since its distinguished missionary, Mariano Avellana Lasierra—recognized as the greatest evangelizer of Chile between 1873 and 1904—gave his life in a mining camp in the north of the country, a life he had vowed to dedicate especially to the sick, prisoners, and the most abandoned.
How could we not see in this the greatest proof of love, which, according to Christ Jesus, consists in laying down one’s life for those whom one loves?
For many years now, February 14 has been consecrated as the Day of Love, and primarily, the Day of Lovers. Centuries ago, it was attributed to Valentine, a Roman physician and devout priest, that he protected and married couples despite an imperial ban by Emperor Claudius II, who believed that marriage was incompatible with a military career. For such disobedience, Saint Valentine is said to have been martyred on February 14, around the year 270. Regardless of these traditions, the date ultimately came to be dedicated, almost by definition, to the celebration and experience of romantic love.
However, beyond the fact that commerce and profit have distorted the true meaning of such a sublime celebration, love itself has become one of the most corrupted and degraded realities. Instead of understanding love as self-giving, even to the point of laying down one’s life for the beloved, it has been turned into a right of possession, domination, and even annihilation and murder of the one who, having supposedly been loved, became deeply hated.
It is no mere coincidence that the 14th of each month, dedicated by the Claretian family to remembering the heroic testimony of love of Mariano Avellana, this February coincides with the Day of Love. Rather, it can be seen as a singular opportunity to show both believers and non-believers his complete testimony of true love. As a beautiful song says: “To love is to give oneself, forgetting oneself, seeking what may make the other happy. How beautiful it is to live to love; how great it is to have in order to give; to give joy and happiness, to give oneself—this is love!”
That Mariano Avellana loved to the point of heroically giving his life was recognized by Pope John Paul II when he declared him Venerable in 1987. His life bore witness to this, in the tireless way he evangelized Chile for 30 years amidst great suffering and hardship, dedicating himself especially to the sick, the prisoners, and the most abandoned. And he did so until he fell, exhausted to death, during the last of his hundreds of missions.
He had not forgotten Christ’s commandment on the eve of His death: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Nor the emphatic words of John, His beloved disciple: “Whoever does not love has not known God, because God is Love. Whoever claims to love God but hates his brother is a liar. How can someone love God, whom they have not seen, if they do not love their brother, whom they have seen?”
And just as Christ loved His friends to the point of giving His life for them, Mariano set out to give his own life in the farthest reaches of an unknown continent to which he had been sent to mission. And he fulfilled it.
The year advances until October of this emblematic 2024, in which we are commemorating the 120th anniversary of the Easter of the Venerable Fr. Mariano Avellana and the 175th anniversary of the Claretian Congregation. And in this month so distinctly Claretian we cannot fail to value the charism that the holy Founder impressed with fire in the soul of Mariano and led him to his missionary dedication to the point of surrendering his life in it. Without this vital impulse it would have been impossible for his enlightened son to evangelise without rest in the American frontier that he had just come to know; and that he did it in the midst of enormous physical sufferings and until he fell dead in the last of his hundreds of missions.
A country of contrasts
One of its great writers called Chile a ‘crazy geography’, noting that in addition to being the second longest and narrowest country in the world, it has almost every possible climate, from its desert ‘northern gate’ to the Antarctic glaciers, and from the Andes Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
Nevertheless, its enormous social contrasts – which, with varying levels and nuances, have endured throughout its almost 500 years of history – constitute an almost permanent element of tension which, in the 31 years of Mariano’s tireless apostolate, was particularly acute.
A mining and agricultural country par excellence, this second characteristic was the most extensive until well into the 20th century. Although extractive mining contributed an essential part of the national treasury from Mariano’s time onwards, subsistence agriculture and the poor exploitation of the land in huge estates that concentrated great poverty and a feudal landlord system, lasted for a long time. In the meantime, state-driven industrialisation was gaining ground and consolidating in a way that became exemplary in Latin America.
A transcendental inflexion point opened up precisely when Mariano set foot on chilean land in 1873: in the enormous area of the Bolivian-Chilean-Peruvian Atacama Desert, the world’s largest concentration of a product that was then very valuable both for agricultural fertilisation and for the manufacture of explosives in the military industry had been discovered: saltpetre, a mixture of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate, which, together with other minerals, was extracted from the mines in a concentrate called caliche.
The control and benefits of the whole productive system – as well as the political management – by the national elites were then concentrated in Santiago and a few other important cities. As a result, the poor and hungry peasants increasingly converged on them, until they formed huge belts of misery, disease, desolation and death around the relatively developed and affluent centres.
Mariano’s mission field
This was the reality that Mariano Avellana faced as soon as he set foot in Santiago, where the Claretian missionaries had arrived only three years earlier to make Chile the first country where they would manage to consolidate themselves outside their native Spain and begin to spread throughout America.
Inspired by the charisma of the Founder, his sons had accepted to settle precisely in one of the most miserable and abandoned sectors of the emerging capital of the country. Fully committed to this reality, the missionaries not only evangelised a very poor population, mostly illiterate, with men enslaved by alcoholism, and with the consequent family violence. They also distributed food, taught how to produce food and natural medicines in the absence of medical services, set up a school, and soon began construction of a church dedicated to the Heart of their Mother, which would eventually become the first Basilica of the Heart of Mary in the world.
From this primary location, Father Mariano went out on mission to the parishes, farm chapels and fields in the surrounding area. Little by little he extended his radius of action, travelling on horseback, in wagons, on foot, in the first trains that plied the country, or in the holds of old cargo ships.
Sneaking into the slums where overcrowding, squalor, pestilence and suffering of all kinds prevailed, he ‘combed more than 1,500 kilometres across the country, missioning without rest. Although a very painful herpes eroded his belly for 20 years until his death, in the midst of which he burst a wound in his leg which, far from healing, grew to the size of an open hand and accompanied him until he died. However, he never mentioned these problems, did not slow down his pace of work because of them, and even continued to ride through the fields and mountains of the crazy Chilean geography.
Bloody Caliche
The ambition for saltpetre sparked international greed and conflict between the three producing countries. Six years after Mariano’s arrival, in 1879 Chile embarked on an armed conflict against Peru and Bolivia, paradoxically known as the ‘War of the Pacific’, which was more accurately known as the ‘Saltpetre War’. Chile emerged triumphant and annexed the Desert regions that had previously been Peruvian and Bolivian. Today they are the largest in the country and the richest in mineral resources.
As a consequence, a ‘white gold rush’ sowed the desert with saltpetre mines, thousands of kilometres of railways, and an unprecedented concentration of workers, who gradually crowded into them with their families.
The exploitation capital was supposed to be Chilean, but the state privatised the operations in order to obtain high taxes for the fiscal coffers, and so the so-called ‘Oficinas Salitreras’ ended up in the hands of mainly English and other countries’ capital.
The enormous social contrasts, injustices and labour abuses that had prevailed in the traditional farms were repeated and increased. So much so that wages were not paid in money, but in tokens exchangeable for food and essential products only in stores called ‘pulperías’ owned by the same employers, who, with honourable exceptions, thus committed abominable usuries.
But the enormous development of the mining industry also became a new field of evangelisation for the sons of Claret, and especially for Father Mariano. Residing for many years in the communities opened in La Serena and Coquimbo, some 480 km north of the capital, he travelled to the minerals located in the area of Copiapó – today’s Atacama region – and further north, in Antofagasta. Despite the fact that irreligiousness, drunkenness, debauchery, prostitution and abuse of women reigned there, the man known as the ‘Apostle of the North’ raised his powerful voice everywhere to shake consciences, rectify courses, recompose families and Christianise environments.
Nevertheless, social injustice led to great tragedies. Father Mariano was already dead when, in 1907, workers from various saltpetre offices went on strike and, with their wives and children, descended en masse from the mines in the Andes Mountains to the management in the port of Iquique, some 1,800 km north of Santiago, to demand better wages and better work. They gathered at the Santa Maria School, and were soon joined by other unions, until the port was virtually paralysed.
Faced with government orders from Santiago, military forces ordered the strikers to vacate the school and leave the city. When they refused, men, women and children were mercilessly gunned down. According to the government, 126 people were killed. But various sources put the death toll at between 2,200 and 3,600. The exact figure has never been clarified.
Alfredo Barahona Zuleta
Vice-postulator, Cause of V. Fr. Mariano Avellana, cmf
Mariano Avellana, considered the greatest evangelizer in more than 150 years of history of the Claretian missionaries in the confines of America, is an especially propitious opportunity to project his figure to the present. In this way, we can imagine with what messages and actions he would travel thousands of kilometers today, in comparison with those he once carried through Chilean soil, in the more than 700 missions, spiritual exercises, and deep reflections that, with abnegation and “heroic” sufferings, he preached for more than 30 years; especially to the sick, the imprisoned and those most neglected by society.
Mariano, tireless in his desire to Christianize the unknown country where he felt sent to become “either a saint or dead,” raised his voice and sought to transform, in accordance with the Gospel and the reality of his time, the religious impiety, situations of sin, injustice, and enormous abuses against the weakest that he encountered there. He did not cease to do so until he fell dead in the last of his missions.
Mission in today’s world
Today’s realities are certainly very different from those of the past. A globalized world has opted mainly for an environmentally destructive development model at a level that is driving the human species to the brink of extinction. In the midst of it, situations of misery, abuse, or persecution have unleashed massive migrations of desperate beings who, in pursuit of the mirage of abundance, perish by the thousands in the ocean or are prevented from entering modern-day Jaujas, suffering, abuse, and death. Can we suppose that Mariano Avellana would keep silent about this in his exhausting missionary journeys?
Wouldn’t dozens of endemic wars that nobody cares about, and new ones that do make the news because of the magnitude of their horrors and possible escalation, which could lead to a global conflict of unimaginable consequences for the whole of humanity, fall within the demands for awareness and coherent action that Mariano would claim as the primary obligations of Christians today?
The innumerable cases of abuse, injustices, and humiliations of the weakest that prevail in the economy, work, and other areas of personal and social relations today, as well as the violations of essential rights, whether to life, integrity, health, food, fair wages, housing, education, protection of children, of abused and murdered women, of the discarded elderly and so many other realities, would they not be pressing issues for the word and action of the distinguished disciple of Claret who was Mariano Avellana?
We cannot think that he would remain impassive and would not demand that Christians “make trouble,” as Pope Francis urges him to do. Even less would he remain silent in the face of more than 36,000 dead, mostly innocent women, children, and the elderly, over 78,000 wounded, 1,500,000 displaced at gunpoint, and more than 70% destruction of the entire infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, a substantial part of the land where the Son of God pitched his tent and wished peace countless times.
Nor would it do the same in the face of the war between Russia and Ukraine, which dates back at least 10 years and, in the last two years, has resulted in more than 80,000 deaths.
An example that questions and demands
We can only guess how he would guide his missionaries in the face of these and other scourges of our world today. But knowing how he approached his world in word and deed, it is possible to infer what kind of missionary Mariano Avellana would be today.
120 years after his death, it is worthwhile not only to reflect on it but, above all, to extract the example that his figure offers to the whole Claretian family, religious and laity, men and women, for whom his passage through the earth is not a mere model to contemplate but a demanding paradigm of missionary life and action according to the full charism of Anthony Mary Claret. This was the source from which Mariano drew inspiration to be the distinguished missionary that we long to see on the altars, as a testimony of what it means to be a missionary “who burns in charity, burns wherever he goes and seeks by all means the glory of God and the salvation of human beings.”
Alfredo Barahona Zuleta
Vice-postulator, Cause of Ven. Fr. Mariano Avellana, cmf
With the end of the year 2023, the commemoration of 150 years since the Venerable Fr. Mariano Avellana set foot on the borders of America, landing in Chile, also came to an end.
From the Claretian Province of San José del Sur, which currently unites the missionary communities of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay, efforts were made so that, using modern means of communication, especially telematic ones, with the scarce financial resources available, it would be possible to project to the wide international Claretian family the admirable example of one of the greatest apostles that Father Claret’s ‘great work’ has given to the world.
In this way, the testimony of the supernatural strength with which the emblematic resolution “Either holy or dead” allowed Mariano Avellana to offer 31 tireless years of life to the mission entrusted by the holy Founder to his sons, confirmed well beyond the American borders that radicalism in evangelisation, as Claret had dreamed it, can become “heroic”, overcoming for decades sufferings that many others would have self-justified in resting, and doing so to the point of falling dead.
Father Mariano, who, in his last 20 years of untiring mission, endured a kind of daily martyrdom with an extremely painful herpes, to which was added a growing and never healed wound in one leg, which tormented him for 10 years until he died, offers a testimony comparable in a certain way to that of his 184 brothers in the congregation who have now been beatified, who offered their lives as martyrs, facing the bullets of their assassins instead of renouncing their religious and missionary commitment.
In this way, the admirable testimony of Father Mariano as a “missionary to the end” has been able to transcend during this 2023 sesquicentennial commemoration of his arrival at the end of America, as worthy that the whole Claretian family around the world invoke the Lord imploring Him for the miracle that, as the only missing requirement, may give way to his earthly glorification through the beatification.
Encouraging in this way that his intercession be invoked in extreme cases of illness or accidents, constitutes for the Claretian family a commitment of gratitude towards one of the most complete exponents of the Claretian missionary charism, worthy of showing from the altars how fidelity to the will of the Lord in one’s own life can surpass, with the strength of the Spirit, the human limitations, until reaching heroism.
Born in Miralcamp (Lérida) on 4 October 1912, he showed a marked attraction to prayer and recollection from an early age.
He first entered the diocesan seminary in Solsona and then the Claretian seminary in Vic.
He took his religious vows on 15 August 1929. The continuation of his career was made difficult by the law on military service and the special circumstances.
Already in 1931 he sensed the danger and wrote home: ‘As for the present situation, we live by the day. We put ourselves in God’s hands because anything can happen’.
‘We are serene,’ he wrote in December 1934, ‘amid the uncertainty that reigns everywhere and can turn things upside down from one day to the next’.
He had been living in Barbastro since August 1935; at the time of his imprisonment, he had just finished his theological studies.
He realized that political events were precipitating and, addressing his family in December of the same year, he said: ‘On these elections depends on the life or death of Spain and perhaps even of Religion’.
Two months later he spoke of the electoral fraud perpetrated by the Left, which did not prevent the narrow victory of the Right in Barbastro.
In June 1936, he heard the revolution beating at the gates and told his relatives: ‘Here there is peace, for now, thank God. Personally, we have not suffered any rudeness or annoyance, although they have forbidden the ringing of bells and have taken over the bishop’s seminary to ruin it. Unfortunately, this is how revolutions go…
Small in stature, lively, and susceptible; it cost him no small effort to come to self-mastery.
He ended his earthly adventure, giving his life for Christ, on 13 August 1936.
His final words are of abandonment in God: ‘May your divine will always be done, O Lord!
FATHER CLARET AND THE PRESS
No one is unaware that almost all of the irremediable evils that modern society deplores have their origin in this libertine press which, under the title of freedom and progress, is inoculating poison into souls and crumbling the edifice of society.
And since it is also true that to prevent the efficacy of a poison, it is necessary to counteract it with a counter-poison, we would like to remember, by extolling his memory, that apostolic man who did so much to inflict it on the society in which it was his lot to live. Let us speak of Venerable Fr. Anthony Ma Claret, for whom the Church is preparing in these days the supreme honour of the altars. Whoever doubts this affirmation has only to take a quick glance at his work, which no one else has equalled, as a popular writer, and he will be sufficiently convinced that it is difficult to find anyone in the 19th century who has done as much Catholic propaganda, by means of the press, as Claret, and that hardly any rival will be found in this sense in the preceding centuries.
If we wanted to give in a few words a general idea of what he wrote, we would say that he wrote about apologetics, morals, asceticism and mysticism, the arts and sciences, oratory and agriculture. In particular, there was no branch in the ecclesiastical subjects about which he did not write something. But note that we consider as pamphlets those writings that do not exceed l60 pages. It is true that he is not the original author of some of them, but he has translated them or improved them in such a way as to make them almost his own. But it is difficult to appreciate the merit and the work that so much writing entails if one does not take into account the continuous and very serious occupation that overwhelmed him, which, had it not been for Fr Claret, would have made it materially impossible for him to write anything. He had no choice but to steal time from sleep.
Many wise and virtuous people, among them the Rmo. Orge, the former General of the Dominicans, could not explain so much activity except by divine intervention.
Not content with having written so much and on so many different subjects, he encouraged others to do the same, and not infrequently he himself paid for their printing. But his greatest work, in this point of Catholic propaganda, is the foundation of the Religious Bookshop and the Academy of St. Michael; works, according to the mind of the founder, destined exclusively to flood society, which groans under the weight of so many bad books and pamphlets, with a deluge of good books.
If figures are the best panegyrist, we have to say that the Religious Bookshop alone from 1848, the date of its foundation, to 1866 printed 2,811,100 volumes of various sizes: 2,509,800 pamphlets and 4,249,200 catechism posters and leaflets. Total: 8,569,800 printed. More than half a million per year. From 1879 to 1902 he printed one million six hundred and seventy thousand.
In less than nine years of existence of the Academy of St. Michael, it distributed 1,734,000 books free of charge, corresponding on average to 120,000 per year: 1,734,004 prints, 25,311 medals, 2,112 crucifixes and 10,201 rosaries. In addition, 20,396 books were lent, and an infinite number of loose sheets and pamphlets were distributed. If Fr. Claret, in all his life, had done nothing more than found the Religious Bookshop and the Academy of St. Michael, he would seriously deserve to have a monument erected to him as an Apostle of the Catholic press. And what shall we say if we consider that the greater part of these writings are his own work? he number of volumes of his own books and pamphlets is known to exceed 6,000,000 souls out of 150 editions that are known and whose number of copies we do not know. And what about the flyleaves, whose editions were much more numerous? The printing house of Aguado alone, in Madrid, published 280 in a short time, which added to those brought out by the Librería Religiosa give the figure of 4,723, 280 copies. And it is noteworthy that almost all these sheets bear allegorical prints, drawn by the Servant of God himself. Other bookshops published works by Father Claret which were to be added to the figures already given. What writer in such a short time has ever been able to see such a prodigious number of copies of his works?
And don’t think that all this was driven by a desire for profit or fame, no, but rather that he was the first to pay the printing costs and distributed them all for free. He himself states that in 1863 he left the Librería Religiosa 4,000 duros. In Cuba he distributed more than 200,000 books. On the trips he made with the kings in Spain, he had arranged that in each city where they stopped he would find a box of books to distribute. In the trip he made through southern Spain in 1862 alone, he distributed more than 85 arrobas of books (“arroba” = 12,4 kg), pamphlets and leaflets.
To conclude: if the great Catalan poet Verdaguer could truly say that “The indefatigable Apostle of Catalonia had been the first, most active and most popular propagandist that the Catalan press had in his century”, we must similarly say of the Apostle of the Canary Islands, of Cuba, of the whole of Spain; for with equal zeal he exercised his apostolate in them, that giant soul, for whose enterprises the world was small.
Claretian Missionary. 23 years old. Student of Theology. He was born in Almatret, a small village of the Province and Diocese of Lérida, Spain, on August 18, 1913. The early death of his mother meant that José María based his formation on the care of his father and teachers. It is not surprising in José María that he always had a somewhat dour character, although with a sympathetic manner, “frank and open, and a well-developed sense of justice”. His teacher, impressed by the boy’s qualities, suggested that he go to a seminary for religious. – And what would I be?” asked the boy. – Well, perhaps a great sage. The fact is that José María, with the intuition of a child, saw that it was God’s plan, for to the companion who wanted to discourage him, he replied calmly: “I have a vocation, and only God can take it away from me”. And to his father, who visited him in the Seminary and tested him by telling him why he did not leave once he had taken advantage of his studies, he said: “No, that would be misbehaving with the Congregation. Besides, I have a vocation and I want to be true to God’s call”. Thus disposed, she entered the novitiate and was professed in the Congregation of the Missionary Sons of the Heart of Mary on 15 August 1930. On the final day of his studies, he was martyred on 13 August 1936. Before his death, he signed his name with a patriotic and religious “Viva España Católica”. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 25 October 1992.
Blessed Fr. Claret the Thinker
Since there are many different prisms that refract the light of reality towards God, according to the perfections under which we consider him, Fr Claret chose his eternity. The thought of eternity was like a magic wand and set in motion all the forces of his heart. Already as a child, when he was four or five years old, when he could not sleep, he would sit on his bed and there, in holy reflection and with his eyes looking at heaven, he would spend the hours thinking of the terrible “always”… “never” of the sufferings of hell; making numerical calculations about eternity and never reaching the end; considering the eternity of God, he had the things of this world in their just value, seeing their passing, their limited reality and little consistency, and the vaporousness of time; absorbed in these contemplations his spirit was burning with the love of the Lord and he was encouraged to pray for the conversion of sinners and the dying.
Later, when he was trying to make his choice of state, moved by the memory of eternity that had been so deeply engraved on him in his childhood, and having given up the flattery that the world offered him, he courageously embraced the priestly vocation, and once he had climbed the steps of the holy altar, he tirelessly travelled through Spain, the Canary Islands, placed himself at the service of Propaganda Fide, went to Cuba, preaching everywhere the “tempus non est amplius”, “there is no more time”, this was the vertex around which the activity of Fr. Claret; this was the motive of his preaching and writings; this was the end to which he directed all his efforts in conquering souls for Jesus Christ.
Another fruit of the thought of eternity was the motto that, like a faithful soldier of Christ, he displayed on his coat of arms, the ardent “charitas Christi urget nos”, the charity of Christ and the zeal for the salvation of souls urges me; seeing the brevity of time and how much has to be done to win the world for Jesus Christ stimulates and urges me in such a way that I feel my breast burning with the desire to travel the whole world and save it with the preaching of the doctrine of Jesus Christ and the brevity of human things.
Fr Claret was certainly not mistaken in considering the things of this world in this way, for how was it possible for it to be so, if he considered everything in relation to God to whom it belongs by essence to be unchangeable, eternal, the centre of our happiness and the supreme reason for all that exists?
May God raise up many men like Claret who preach the eternity of God and the finiteness of what is before our eyes, and make the different classes of the present society come a little more to their senses. Oh! If we were to consider things through the prism of eternity, that is, if we were thinkers, how different the men of the present century would be, and how different the spiritual world of souls would look.
You must be logged in to post a comment.