“May the centenary of Lábrea serve to revive the missionary spirit and the commitment of the Augustinian Recollect Family to this mission” [Part 1]

How is the centenary of the Prelature being experienced in Lábrea?

This historical memory is essential for us: a century of Prelature and, in 2025, a century of presence of the Augustinian Recollects. The entire Amazon was a fragmented diocese. The Prelatures were established by geographical criteria based on rivers as a communication factor and were entrusted to religious orders. Before becoming a Prelature, a few priests in Lábrea gave their lives in the first evangelization.

When the Recollects arrived, not even all of the Order seemed to agree to accept the Prelature, and some suffered so much from the living conditions and illnesses that they did not want to stay. But in this century, there have also been golden periods of missionary work and essential advances in social matters thanks to the work of the religious, who, in many cases, were heroic.

To celebrate this, we wanted to make our People aware of their history. The Virgin of Nazareth is a starting point and a point of union. She came to Lábrea as a patron because, at that time, Belém do Pará was the seat of the diocese. There is the most famous sanctuary of Our Lady of Nazareth with its Candle, one of the most important religious manifestations in all of Brazil.

On May 1st, we opened the Centenary in Lábrea, giving great prominence to the creation bull, which we keep and played an important role. That same day, the pilgrimage of a replica of Our Lady of Nazareth began throughout all the parishes, and rural communities were visited along the way. There are materials to celebrate a novena, the welcome and farewell of the Virgin, the implantation of a missionary cross, texts to spread history, and our songs…

Many things have happened in a hundred years, but only in February we had the first ordination of a native priest and for the Prelature. Hopefully, we will not have to wait another hundred years for the next vocation to the consecrated ministry!

In May 2025, the image will return to Lábrea with representatives of all the Parishes. We are already organizing the logistics of the reception. The closing ceremony of the Prelature’s centenary will open with the arrival of the Augustinian Recollects.

Hopefully, the Centenary will not be a reminder of old memories of our glories but a true awareness of the Order’s living missions. The General and Provincial Chapters even determined that there should be a minimum of four religious in the missionary communities and that the missions should be promoted.

I protest that this has not been fulfilled. Lábrea cannot be a kind of advertising postcard, with striking photos and eye-catching works, but rather a preferential space for evangelization that commits us as an Augustinian-Recollect Family.

Today, the Prelature has five parishes and a missionary area. The Augustinian Recollects are in three parishes, Lábrea, Tapauá, and Pauiní, and in Lábrea there is a community of the Augustinian Recollect Missionaries. In the new parish of Foz de Tapauá and Belo Monte resides and collaborates the Augustinian Recollect Jesús Moraza, bishop emeritus of the Prelature, but there is no Recollect community.

Hopefully, the Centenary will ignite the missionary fire, which will not be limited to remembering other times and the milestones achieved in the past. We are asked for a commitment and conscience not to lower the missionary tension but to continue and improve what our religion, with much effort and sacrifice, has done for a century.

It would be a shame if we had to look for workers from outside for a harvest that was entrusted to us, not because there is a shortage of vocations, something understandable, but because there is a shortage of missionary spirit, something more challenging to assimilate and understand.

Has there been a symbiosis between the Amazon and the Recollect Family?

There has been a double influence: the Prelature has entrusted us with a concrete way of being missionaries, and we have left our spirituality and charismatic vision of the world and the Church. This double influence is still maintained.

The Recollect religious, the Augustinian Recollect missionaries Sisters, and even the secular Fraternities are already part of the Amazonian landscape; our saints preside over the Parishes (Saint Augustine of Pauiní and Saint Rita of Tapauá) and many chapels of urban and rural base communities…

Our characteristic community life attracts our people, who are supportive and live from the spirituality of the Christian base communities… Our people are very celebratory and love rituals and traditions; our saints have won many devotees. The Recollection and the Purús people have lived together for a century, and we have learned from each other in cultural, evangelical, and missionary aspects in working together not only in spiritual life and ecclesial construction but also in factors such as health, education, care for minors and the sick, and the excluded…

What dream do you have for the Prelature in this celebration of its first century?

My dream is to have a more significant presence of missionaries from the Augustinian-Recollect Family. This presence is continually requested of us: our people want to be accompanied, to share their lives with us, and to go together toward the gospel of Jesus.

A “simply being” changes everything. An anecdote: in Belo Monte, about 30 years ago, practically everyone was evangelical. Today, the priest Henrique Giera was incardinated in the Prelature, although he came to it as an Augustinian Recollect and settled there then. When he had to take on other tasks, a community of Josephines continued this pastoral care with a permanent presence.

Belo Monte is today one of the two headquarters of the Parish of Saint Sebastian and Saint Francis, the fifth form in the Prelature, has base communities in the north of Canutama and the south of Tapauá. The constant presence has made it a living, growing, committed Catholic community today.

When I ordained the first priest of the Prelature, I gave him one piece of advice: “Be with the people.” The phrase is not mine. In one of the meetings in Rome with Pope Francis, when I told him that I was a bishop in the Brazilian Amazon, he answered me like this: “Be with the people.” It stuck with me, and that is my dream: that we are there, with the people, to accompany them, serve them, evangelize, and be evangelized. One might think that “simply being there” is not very useful; that is how nothing is achieved.

My experience is that it makes you a reference; it is a direct way of evangelizing through example and presence. Who else wants to stay with them? They value it because no one else does that for them; their world is one of the excluded and forgotten. This would be my dream, and all the others can be included in it because it is an ideal starting point for any other goal.

Five years later, what has the Synod for the Amazon left in Labrea?

The impact of the synodal process has been uneven. In the Brazilian Church, the large group of bishops from the Amazon and several others are very committed, but some are indifferent, and even those who are critical.

For example, in the Commission for Missions of the Episcopal Conference (CNBB), there are support movements for missions in Mozambique. At the same time, there continues to be a shortage of ministers and resources in the local Churches of the Amazon.

A curious case: two deacons from another Diocese came to Labrea for a missionary experience and to complete their preparation for the priesthood. They did not want to dedicate specific training time to the Synod because they did not find it exciting or necessary for their later ministry.

In the Amazon itself, many region inhabitants, for example, do not condemn the fires and deforestation; they believe they will improve the economy by providing pastures for livestock, more farmland, and mining opportunities. They do not support the Pope’s claims regarding the common House and its defense.

One day, my family called me from Spain, worried because they had seen the fires in Labrea on the news. Thousands of kilometers away, they were more alert than here! Many days, the city is entirely of smoke; it smells of burning, and the deaths of respiratory patients are skyrocketing.

The Synod brought us round tables, dialogue, and awareness to be more aware. Our pastoral agents are less tied to short-termism and know that destroying the forest generates more poverty and eliminates the way of life of the Amazonian peoples.

But many are concerned only with what is in front of them and do not think about the problems of others; they only look at their own interests. In other cases, when money is in hand, corruption appears, and they decide to sell their land, let trawling boats pass, or facilitate the trade in wood, hunting, or fishing of species prohibited by law.

Many have managed to internalize the four dreams of the Pope for the Amazon (social, cultural, ecological, ecclesial). Some discussions about the Amazonian rite, the ordination of “viri probati” or the female diaconate have taken media attention above other aspects that interest us more, such as the reinforcement of evangelization, initiation, and formation for an adult and conscious Christianity, or the in-depth study of the culture, values, and language of our peoples through the so-called Amazonian Ecclesiastical Conference.

It is also essential to eliminate romanticism and idealizations of the Indigenous world, which must enjoy progress in health, education, well-being, or integration and resolve conflicts with the non-indigenous world and among ethnic groups and peoples…

After eight years as bishop, what improvements have you noticed in pastoral work?

Since I arrived, the pastoral objective has been to make the initiation into Christian life effective, a progressive and continuous catechesis, and evangelization, something decided in the Assembly before my arrival: evangelizing instead of mere sacramentalism.

Many feel the tendency to maintain “the same as always”… The change is radical now. It is no longer “your turn to celebrate the sacrament by age,” but rather “you will receive it when you are ready”… Due to the greater demand, many have even gone to evangelical churches. We have made progress in the foundations, but numerically, we have kept the number of our faithful.