In the year of the Amazon Synod, we wish to recover the memory and testimonial of Florentino Zabalza, Augustinian Recollect and Bishop of the Prelature of Lábrea (Amazon, Brazil) from 1971 to 1994, who left his memoirs that are now offered to all audiences, for the first time, through AgustinosRecoletos.org.
Before leaving Florentino with the word in his mouth, let’s get to know its author a little better with a short biography.
Friar Florentino Zabalza Iturri belonged to the Order of Augustinian Recollects and was for 22 years and five months (1971-1994) bishop of the Prelature of Lábrea. This was made up of four parishes that coincide territorially with the four municipalities in the southwest of the Brazilian state of the Amazon where they are located: Tapauá (Parish of Saint Rita of Cascia), Canutama (Parish of Saint John the Baptist), Lábrea (Parish of Our Lady of Nazareth) and Pauiní (Parish of Saint Augustine).
Just one year before being named bishop, in 1970, Florentino had arrived as a volunteer missionary from Colombia, to that Amazonian and Brazilian mission where the Augustinian Recollects have been present since 1925.
He was born in Bigüézal (Navarra, Spain) on October 16, 1924, the son of Francisco and Teresa, in an extensive family of nine siblings; three of them were Augustinian Recollect religious: Florentino himself, Pedro and Juan.
He began his studies in his hometown until he entered the Saint Joseph of the Augustinian Recollects Apostolic College in Artieda (Navarra, Spain), located about 25 kilometers from his home. This was one of the minor seminaries of the Order of Augustinian Recollects in Spain. He belonged at that time to the Province of Our Lady of Candelaria. Today an alternative cultural association is installed in the building:
The students lived in a boarding school regime and studied compulsory subjects while their possible religious vocation and their subsequent entry into the novitiate were clarified. This was very common in Spain in the 60s, 70s and 80s of the 20th century and, as in this case, many were located in rural settings.
After finishing the compulsory formal education, Florentino felt the religious vocation and decided to continue preparing to be a member of the Order of Augustinian Recollects; for this reason he moved to the convent of Our Lady of Valentuñana, in Sos del Rey Católico (Zaragoza), also near his hometown (45 kilometers).
He entered the novitiate on October 7, 1939 when he was not yet 15 years old: he was nine days away from his birthday. To be able to profess religious vows at the time, a minimum of 16 years was required. For this reason he did not finish his novitiate until October 21, 1940, when he professed the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience and was welcomed into the religious Province of Our Lady of Candelaria, whose headquarters are in Colombia.
The next step was the study of Philosophy, which he also did in Sos del Rey Católico between 1940 and 1943. Later he continued with the study of Theology (1943-1947) between Colombia and the Dominican Republic. The profession of solemn vows, definitive and permanent incorporation into the Order, was made on October 22, 1945 in Bogotá. Likewise, in Bogotá he was ordained as a deacon on April 1, 1945 by Emilio de Brigard Ortiz (1888-1986), then auxiliary bishop of the Colombian capital.
A little over a year later, on July 20, 1946, he was ordained a priest in Manizales (Caldas, Colombia) by the Augustinian Recollect bishop Nicasio Balisa Melero (1863-1965), at that time apostolic vicar of Casanare, one of the oldest missions in the Order.
From that moment on, Florentino began a long journey of 17 years as an educator. He was a teacher, sometimes for seminarians of the Order, sometimes for external students, at the seminary of La Linda (Manizales), at the Lyceum and the Seminary of Tumaco (Nariño), at the seminary of Suba (Bogotá), at the Augustinian College of Palmira (Valle), which he founded in 1963… He taught human studies in public schools and dogmatic theology, moral theology or canon law in religious training centers.
On more than one occasion he took the lead and worked hard in the rehabilitation or construction of infrastructures, such as the restoration of the Ricaurte parish church in Tumaco, which lasted five months, in the construction and expansion of the Augustinian College and in the rehabilitation of the residence of the religious of this same place.
In 1961, the Province of Our Lady of Consolation was formed in the Order of Augustinian Recollects with part of the religious and communities of the Province of Our Lady of Candelaria. Florentino was attached to the new Province.
This allowed him, from 1964 to 1970, to take the pulse of a new apostolate, the ministerial one. He was able to do it in Cali (Valle, Colombia), serving the parish of Saint Jude Thaddeus and the parroquial vicarage of Our Lady of Lajas.
As a religious, since the mid-fifties he already had various responsibilities in the community: he was vice-prior of Suba, prior of Palmira, prior of Cali and, for a year, teacher of professed religious.
After 17 years as a teacher and 9 as a parish priest, in 1970 he received a new vocational call and decided to volunteer for the Brazilian mission of Lábrea, which belonged to the Province of Saint Rita, but was in great need of missionaries.
The prior general of the Order had started a campaign to find missionaries willing to collaborate in the rest of the Provinces of the Order and Florentino was one of those who wanted to join.
Labrea at that time was probably the most difficult mission of the Order in terms of the practical dimensions of evangelization. It had serious gaps in terms of the number of missionaries, a material situation full of scarcity for everyone, an almost total lack of communications, insufficient and limited resources, a very small population but dispersed in an enormous and jungle area, illiteracy that prevented any type of systematic formation or of a certain depth; and, for the missionaries, surrounded almost without interruption by loneliness, illness, feelings of inadequacy and impotence in the face of such a task with so few resources and in such a hostile environment.
It was the year 1970 and Florentino did not know that in a few months he was going to be named bishop of the Prelature. Not only did he not know what to expect, but somehow, when he volunteered to go on the mission, anticipating that some kind of responsibility might fall on him for being one of the oldest volunteers (45 years old), he indicated to the prior general in the offer letter: “Volunteer, yes, our father, but as one more, not as a superior”.
The fact is that Labrea had been without a bishop for too long. On November 30, 1967, the Holy See had accepted the resignation of the previous apostolic administrator, the Augustinian Recollect bishop José Álvarez Macua (Dicastillo, Navarra, 1906-†1974). Since then, the Bishop of Coarí, the Redemptorist Mario Roberto Emmett Anglim (Lombard, Illinois, United States 1922-†1973) acted as apostolic administrator; but his Prelature had similar characteristics to that of Labrea in terms of extension, distances, and resources. It was not easy to carry both responsibilities on his shoulders.
Once the mission had new staff with volunteers from other Provinces, the Holy See felt it was time to name a new bishop for Labrea. Having made the consultations and accepted the order by obedience, Florentino received the episcopal consecration on August 28, 1971 in the church of Saint Joseph de Ribeirão Preto, in the State of São Paulo, Brazil.
The consecration ceremony was presided over by Bernardo José Bueno Miele (1923-1981), Coadjutor Archbishop of that same city, who was accompanied by the Archbishop of Manaus (Amazon, Brazil), the Cistercian João de Souza Lima (1913-1984); the Bishop of Franca (São Paulo, Brazil), Diógenes da Silva Matthes (1931-2016); and up to five Augustinian Recollect bishops: José Álvarez Macua (resigned from Lábrea, Amazonas, Brazil), Alquilio Álvarez Díez (1919-1985, prelate of Marajó, Pará, Brazil), Gregorio Alonso Aparicio (1894-1982, resigned from Marajó), Arturo Salazar Mejía (1921-2009, Apostolic Vicar of Casanare, Colombia) and Rubén Darío Buitrago Trujillo (1921-1991, Auxiliary of Bogotá, Colombia).
The Prior General of the Order, Fray Luis Garayoa Macua, the same one who had accepted Florentino as a volunteer for the mission, represented the Order at the ceremony, while Florentino’s two Augustinian Recollect religious brothers, Pedro and Juan, and their sister Josefa traveled to Ribeirão Preto to accompany her brother on this important day.
Florentino was bishop of Lábrea until his health no longer allowed him to serve the people of God with the same efficiency as when he had arrived as a young adult on the mission. Despite the fact that he was ten years away from the obligatory resignation due to the age of bishops (75 years), on January 12, 1994 the Pope accepted his resignation, motivated mainly by the serious, chronic and irreversible health problems he suffered, and for whom the tropical jungle climate was torture.
Florentino spends the last years of his life in Spain, where the climate is much more benign for his advanced osteoarthritis, and he establishes his residence in the Augustinian College that his Augustinian Recollect Province has in the neighborhood of La Estrella of Madrid.
On September 12, 2000, he was admitted to Our Lady of the Rosary hospital of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Ann in Madrid, and at the age of 75, Florentino died of a pulmonary complication.
In Labrea, the news of his death caused great sadness and, although it had been six years since he had left the Amazon, his almost 25 years of tireless work in the region for others had not gone unnoticed by the people and his Augustinian Recolllect brothers. who hastened to show their prayer, affection and gratitude:
The communities of Labrea mourn the death of the one who for twenty-four years gave his life and was its shepherd, who loved these people as he knew how to, who cared for everyone until he lost his quiet. In these moments of departure for the heart of the Father, we all say to you: thank you very much, Dom Florentino! We the missionaries, the Indians, the lepers, the communities of the rivers, those who work in pastoral care, your friends who have cried when they heard the news of your going to the Father, tell you: “Thank you Dom Florentino!
The prior general of the Order of Augustinian Recollects at the time of his death, Fray Javier Guerra, wrote some letters for his funeral, of which we highlight:
Now I am reminded of his way of greeting and welcoming, his smile and the overflowing joy of good humor, his goodness and cheerfulness, his vitality and fragility. Many of us remember his words, his jokes, his silences, his prayers, his handshakes, his advice and his dedication to the apostolate (…), his dedication to shepherding his flock, dissipating enthusiasm in all his commitments.
We cannot make a detailed study here of the meaning of his episcopacy for the Prelature of Labrea, something that will remain in the hands of historians theoretically and pastoralists in its practical part.
But we can affirm that the real consequences of Florentino’s work as servant and bishop of Labrea are not alien to the faithful of the region; he was the bishop who brought to Lábrea the conclusions and reforms of Vatican II and of the Latin American Bishops’ Conferences with his great, significant and profoundly renewing documents from Medellín (1968), Puebla (1979) and Santo Domingo (1992).
It was the bishop who trusted the laity, the small communities; that he always showed his face without avoiding the gaze of the most vulnerable (Indians, riverbank residents, women, the sick, minors); that he trusted his clergy as one does a brother, because he felt like a brother to all of them; that he prepared the way for the Assemblies of the Prelature, that he suffered with those who suffered the most and watched over his flock until exhaustion of both his strength and his health.
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