5. Half a century building the Parish

A. Beginnings

In 1873 they had built the small community church of Saint John the Baptist of Arimã in a community a day away by boat in what is now Tapaua, up the Purus. It had a brick chapel. For many years you could visit its ruins, in particular its cemetery, with marble paving which little by little was consumed by the forest. Today, there is nothing left. In Arimã Bishop Ignacio Martinez was buried, after dying not far from there, in Nova Fe, of fever during a desobriga. In 1949 his remains were moved to Labrea. For the first years of evangelization, a priest in Labrea celebrated religious services every year in Arimã. But the violence, and the lack of law enforcement, led to this being stopped and it was left without inhabitants.

Martinez (Bishop of Labrea between 1930 and 1942) was the first to put in writing the idea of establishing a parish in the region of Tapaua. He had thought of a hypothetical division of the Prelature, with a parish dedicated to Our Lady of Consolation in Paripi (Ave Maria) which would cover the area from the Tapaua River until Tambaquí. The lack of people available made this unworkable as a plan.

In the territory of Tapaua there had been only four chapels attended to in the desobrigas, first from Labrea and later from Canutama: that of the Holy Soldier from Boca do Jacaré, that of Bom Jesus dos Passos from Tambaquí, and that of Saint Francis of Boca de Tapaua, the most populated place since the foundation of the municipality, and that of Jaburu.

B. New Parish (1^st of May, 1965)

The Parish of Saint Rita was erected on the 1^st of May 1965. The date was chosen because of the fortieth celebration of the Prelature of Labrea and as homage to the Second Vatican Council, whose fourth and last session began in September of this year. Cestaro made beforehand an “inaugural” journey from Nova Olinda until Paraná de Elba announcing the construction of the new Parish.

The Bishop José Alvarez took some time to visit the new Parish because he was busy; during these months he travelled to Rome to assist at the Council, participated in the Episcopal ordination of Alquilio Alvarez in Soure (Pará), and underwent various medical visits and surgery. On the 26^th of September 1967 the city received him with great display and with banners, and he was there for twenty days with the faithful. There months later he stopped work because of ill health. The Prelature went a long time, three years, without a Bishop until the naming of Florentino Zabalza in 1971. On the 26^th of February 1974 José Alvarez died in Franca (São Paulo).

In July 1967 the parishioners were witnesses for the first time to the love and hard work of the Female Augustinian Recollect Missionaries, from the community of Labrea. The Mother Ángeles, one of the founders of the congregation, together with the Sisters María Inés, María Luiza, Ana María and Visitação left behind great pastoral efforts and visited each and every one of the families.

C. The parish Church

The Prelature bought the house of Henrique Cordeiro in the central main square of Tapaua for 80,000 cruzeiros (€400), a price considered to be very high by the religious “considering the bad state of the house”. What Cestaro thought most important in the purchase was the territory, ten meters in front on the main square and sixty meters at the back. It served as the first chapel. Later they would buy two more houses from Valdomiro Cordeiro (90,000 cruzeiros) and João Nogueira (50,000 cruzeiros), with which they enlarged the territory to its actual size.

Before starting the Parish, the Bishop José Alvarez had already thought about its infrastructure. For this reason, he bought in São Paulo a metal structure for 725,500 cruzeiros, some €3,500 euros today.

In Manaus they had a collection, for it was impossible to find economic help in Tapaua given the situation. The structure arrived in Tapaua on the 27^th of April 1963. Unloading it was not easy; the religious who wrote it down tells of the indifference of the authorities who didn´t help to carry such a weighty sea load up to the construction area.

On the 18^th of August 1963 there was a serious accident. The framework that supported the metal structure gave way and fell on the workers; five of them were unharmed, but one lost an ear. The structure was not broken and the plan was to continue using it. Nonetheless, after three years without it being put in place and with the effect of the Amazon climate on its structure it was sold in Manaus, and the church was built with the current structure.

The image of Saint Rita was donated by the Labrea parish. Before this it had been in the Educandário Santa Rita, the head of the Prelature. In 1963, with an unfinished church, they celebrated for the first time Saint Rita’s day. The anniversary is the 22^nd of May, but this was moved to Sunday the 19^th to allow more people to be present. Coinciding with the amazon winter high river flow, the city was almost empty with people working in fishing and wood lumber.

The Church is located in a favourable place in the city, but for this reason it was necessary to build over a great slope at the rear. Originally it only had only one tower. In different reforms this has got bigger. Later they built a second tower, improved the electrics and sound, and today there it is a beautiful and dignified church, the pride of the Catholics there.

D. The parish school

When the Church was built, an incident made between Catholics and Evangelicals made relations more difficult. Milton Rosas, the benefactor of the missionary Evangelicals, had rented from the local Government land next to the new church. For many years the rent had not been payed, nor the fees favouring buying the property. Seeing that the Catholic Church had been built, there was new interest in the land with the idea of building an Evangelical Church directly in front of the Catholic one.

The recollect religious on learning this asked the local Government to donate the land to the Catholic Church for the construction of the already planned parish school, with the idea of avoiding two churches being near to each other.

The local Government had to resolve the problem. In April 1964 they circulated a law for all public rented lands who had not fulfilled the payments, or that had not made use of them for more than one year, to return them to their proprietors. On the same day they published another decision which donated this particular land for the building of a school.

Tapaua had “a social climate steeped in vice, where the young and adolescents were formed in an atmosphere of immorality and continual partying, or at least very frequently”. In this way education started to inhabit a preferential place for law and order. “With the wood we have and the roof tiles [sent for the Parish residence] we will build the José Alvarez school; we are excited about the idea”, wrote the Bishop on the 15^th of March 1964.

E. The house of the Recollects

The old house bought from Henrique Cordeiro was cleaned out and divided into two: a large room of 40 m² and a separate sacristy, which served as a bedroom for Cestaro. He lived in it for eleven months, until February 1964. Many nights he has to ask for refuge because of the frequent leaks. When Novacki arrived they moved to live in a space given by the local Government funds where there was a bedroom, a lounge, a kitchen and a bathroom. It was made for the Mayor who used another house and was allowed to move. As has been mentioned, the materials for the house had been taken to build the parish school.

When the community house was built they started using left over material from two previous buildings, together with material donated by Labrea. There were also generous donations from inhabitants near to Lake Jacinto; one of the inhabitants, Camilo, donated a large quantity of wood for the house; and forty years later, the same person donated the land and wood for the Casisiaco Retreat House.

The construction of the house was an adventure: the unloading and moving by hand the wood and the 4,500 bricks; the eventful trips in order to buy materials; the hiring of a master builder from Manaus who fled without finishing the job with the money; the problems with the workers of the building firm who denounced the owner in court; the internal hernia which Cestaro suffered by carrying beams… But the arrival of Enéas Berilli and his skills as a builder allowed the house to be officially opened on the 20^th of July 1965.

In 1995, given that the house is on a steep slope, they had to find a solution for the land shifts and they built a containing wall, added more columns, changed pipes and built a chapel.

In 1998 they added a bathroom to each of the four rooms, and in 2004 the whole house was painted and air conditioning was installed. Throughout one of the constant problems has been the presence of bats hibernating under the roof.

It is, without a doubt, one of the most striking houses of the Recollect communities in the whole world; for its shape and highly practical distribution, for its relationship with the surrounding environment and because, despite being in the city centre, the feeling is that of being in the middle of the Amazon forest. The religious eat overlooking nothing but an immense forest.

F. The parish buildings today

The parish buildings today in Tapaua are spread out throughout the municipal centre and house buildings for a variety of services. In the large central main square, apart from the main Church and the house for the religious, there are some more buildings that provide various functions. The parish hall is located in the middle of the main square and gives a good view of the meeting of waters. In this the dark waters from the Ipixuna River meet with the brown waters of the River Purus, and for some hundred meters do not mix but rather flow side by side, in a phenomenon known as the “meeting of the waters”.

After its construction in the 70’s, this hall was used for all types of events. It has been the main place for the feasts of the town, it has taken in young people, it has offered space for catechesis on Saturdays, it has been rented for periods of time for social projects for the Amazon State like that of the eradication of child labour (PETI)… In 2010 it was reformed and strengthened.

On the left side of the Church they built halls for catechesis, meetings and pastoral events, and it also housed the Centre of Hope (Centro Esperança) in its beginnings. In 2005 a second floor was built and they put the parish office and the radio room in there. There are ten rooms with Augustinian names or those connected with the history of the Prelature: Dom Florentino, Dom Ignacio Martinez, Friar Mario Sabino, Friar Jesús Pardo, Sister Cleusa, Saint Augustine, Saint Monica, Saint Magdalene of Nagasaki, Saint Nicholas of Tolentine, and Saint Ezekiel Moreno.

In Tapaua there are four more Catholic churches, with halls for catechesis, and for grass roots communities in which urban spaces have been divided up. They are dedicated to Saint Joseph, Saint Augustine, Our Lady of Aparecida and Saint John the Baptist. They have had an important role of bringing together districts (bairros) and have housed a variety of social outreach Religious activities like the care of infants, visiting the sick, leadership, training for ministers of the Word and of Communion in Churches and as well informed guides and teachers of their own people with self-management skills. There was already seen the necessity of a new community with its own infrastructure on the Purus River district. It is the newest and the closest to the airport, and has grown spectacularly in the last fifteen years.

The Hope Centre (Centro Esperança) came into being using the same halls as those of catechesis, but was able to count on a new building and a covered sports facility in the Açai district; the most populated in the city.

Outside of the city, some two and a half hours by boat and twenty minutes by speedboat, is the Casiciaco Retreat House. It is a special place, and like a picture postcard paradise with parish buildings. These include a floating dock in Lake Jacinto that receives the people, who after climbing a wooden staircase come to a wide construction with a kitchen, bathrooms, and a covered room with open walls to the immense forest and with views of the lake.

G. River craft

This section might seem strange, but it has an explanation: the River Purus is the “central highway” which communicates the rural zone with the urban centre, and the only exit and arrival post without the use of airplanes, to the outside world. The missionaries have lived a good part of their time on boats, and they are an essential part of their work, their second home, and one of the things which has taken up the most resources.

The first “initial parish journey” was made by Cestaro in a motorized canoe from the Canutama parish called Archimedes. They also used neighbours’ and friends’ boats, but they quickly saw the need for their own river craft in order to organize visits in a methodical way and with the sole objective of evangelization. The first one arrived in the middle of 1964; the recollects knew that Mario Maia de Souza, a good friend in the Abufarí region, was selling a canoe. When they negotiated the purchase, Mario offered it for free and even gave 5,000 cruzerios for any necessary repairs. They gave it the name of the Missionary and they put in it the motor from the Archimedes, which had now been given them permanently.

This allowed them to advance in the planned visits. The inhabitants of the River Jacaré received for the first time the Augustinian Recollect missionaries on the 2^nd of June 1964. The misery they found ended up being written in the newspapers; for they even saw the strange death of a dog because of hunger. They gave out powdered milk, flour from maize and wheat from the packages of Cáritas (CAFOD): “The most deplorable thing is that everyone lived submerged in unsupportable debts with their bosses and without any hope of economic freedom; they lived like slaves all their lives”. They also visited the rivers of Tapaua, Cunhuã and Piranhas. They noted the in talking with people the frequent mention of the remnants of an unknown tribe, the first written reference about the zuruahã.

Since then, river transport from the parish has been varied and of all types, as has also been where the resources have come from to look after them. In 1995 they built the boat Saint Rita with a new structure and a new motor, with funds donated by a family in Ivybridge (Devon, England). Ten years later it was made bigger with a second level added.

The Parish and some of its services centred on the rural zone like care for the Earth, work with the Indigenous or with Infants, and have also counted on diverse fast boats with outside motors.

A boat is not only expensive to make, but also to maintain. They require constant care, maintenance, painting and caulking, tonnes of fuel and oils. As well as qualified people with an in depth knowledge of the river, tributaries and shortcuts which appear when the waters are high and which save hours of travelling and fuel. All this has to be paid for.

There have also been incidents. In the Prelature of Labrea the religious Mario Sabino died after a boat accident. The present Bishop, Jesús Moraza, after visiting Canutama when he was Parish Priest had a mishap which almost sunk the boat in July 1988. Several times, more than one might think or has been written, there have been moments of grave danger, unexpected accidents and incidents, and breakdowns. There is also the necessary charity of being on the river, which includes being taken in or taking in themselves families, the sick and other travellers with problems.

There have also been another adventures, some more recent, that include searching the boat because the police suspected that it was trafficking drugs (!!!) as well as it being stopped because the driver didn´t have the necessary permission to use it.

Whatever happens, the arrival of the Parish boat in a rural community always involves a show of joy, happiness and making people feel loved and attended to in a habitat which condemns them to isolation and loneliness. The second house of the religious, when it travels, brings with it the values of the Augustinian Recollect charism which include friendship and acceptance.

NEXT PAGE: 6. Presence in the rural region

---

.