The social network Facebook has a Page that promotes spiritual care and the union of prayers between patients, families, caregivers and health professionals with the intercession of the Recollect saint, protector of cancer patients for the Church.
In September 2014, ten years ago, the Saint Ezekiel Moreno Virtual Center of Prayer for the Sick was inaugurated on Facebook, a space for the human-spiritual care of sick people, their caregivers, companions and families. The social network provides virtual closeness, fraternal welcome and joint prayer breaking the space-time molds.
The Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine of the Augustinian Recollects already had a spiritual irradiation center dedicated to the holy Recollect bishop in its convent of Monteagudo (Navarra, Spain). It includes a permanent exhibition and a visit to the temple where he professed, the chapel where his remains reside, the room where he spent his last weeks of life and some of his personal objects.
The surroundings of the novitiate convent are also included, where the saint began his journey in religious life and where he became prior.
However, this Center was not enough, tied by the limits of space and time: how to reach so many people who live this situation far from the walls of the convent?
In 2014, social networks were already a common element in society and opened the possibility of reaching many more people in many more places. For this reason, the Province opened this Virtual Prayer Center, whose management was entrusted to the Communication and Publications Commission, to put these patients, families and professionals in contact through screens and their free and joint interaction.
A name and his goals
Saint Ezekiel Moreno (1848-1906), a missionary and Augustinian Recollect bishop who lived in the Philippines, Spain and Colombia, gives name and content to this page. The publications promote knowledge of his life, his experience and his spiritual life.
The Church has proposed Saint Ezekiel as a special intercessor for the sick within the broad world of cancer, a unique name for many specific diseases, but which the saint suffered and died from.
That is why he presides over this Virtual Prayer Center, so that those who seek a personal response to the pain of illness can meet people who live the same situation and with shared spiritual support. Currently, in its tenth anniversary, the page has a virtual community of just under 3,000 people.
The page thus wants to open a horizon of hope and meaning to so many people and families wounded by the circumstances of life or illness. Mutual support is always a balm, and the Augustinian Recollect charism and the life of the saint offer this way of solution: in the face of loneliness and self-absorption in these difficult times, community life and dialogue, fraternal encounter and mutual consolation.
In addition, the Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine offers virtual spiritual accompaniment on this page to those people who require it in a more personal way. The social network allows direct dialogue through private messages. Those who respond to these messages are Augustinian Recollect priest, willing to listen and offer support, as well as to accept specific prayer requests.
The Virtual Prayer Center, being online, serves as a meeting point for patients and their families, for companions and for health professionals, for those who have suffered directly or indirectly the ravages of illness; logically it can be cancer, but also any other. Pain and illness overwhelm life as a whole and expose the body and mind, relationships and life plans. The page aims to create pastoral support: in addition to medical care and treatments, the patient can “treat themselves spiritually.”
Logically, the Virtual Center page encourages prayer for and by the sick. Here there is a novelty thanks, precisely, to virtual communication: several cloistered monasteries of contemplative Augustinian Recollect Nuns have joined and collect personalized prayer requests in their minds and hearts. Cloistered nuns from all over the world join together personally and communally through the page.
Hopefully, the Virtual Prayer Center will be an ideal forum for everyone, no matter if they are Catholics, believers of other religions, agnostics or indifferent, because illness has nothing to do with ideology, way of life, place or time in life in which it appears. Listening is assured, as well as total respect and dialogue from the full recognition of the other.
The sick in the Augustinian Recollect charism
In his Rule, written for those who wished to live in community as the saint proposed, Saint Augustine (354-430) establishes that in community life common values should always prevail over personal values: there should never be privileges, exemptions, or people who disengage from the needs of others and the community to attend only to their own desires, needs or wishes.
However, there is one situation in which Augustine does allow for the safeguarding of a special affection, an attention above the normal, an almost total indulgence: with the member of the community who is sick. The general rule is shattered: they can have their own schedule, their own food, better clothes, better housing…
The Augustinian Recollects drew up their rules for life and coexistence in the community through a text by Friar Luis de León called Way of life (1589). He clearly draws on St. Augustine and strongly emphasizes austerity and equality among the brothers.
But when he speaks of the sick, the Form of Life completely changes the perspective: “There must be neither scarcity nor poverty, nor anything that excuses either the priors or the subjects from not treating them with all kindness, considering that they give and serve God in this.”
Since then, the sick have been, in all the normative texts of the Augustinian Recollects throughout history, the “treasure of the community.” And this spirit crosses the borders of the community to permeate pastoral life and ministerial service.
Ezekiel Moreno is one of the main representatives in history of the intense, profound, committed and convinced experience of the Augustinian Recollect charism. That is why when he arrived in Monteagudo after being given up for dead by the doctors, he received this gift from the community: his room looked directly onto the temple through a special window and, located to the south, was one of the most comfortable; the members of the community went out of their way to help him and encourage him in the face of the intense pain he suffered from his palatine-nasal cancer at a time when current medicine did not yet know painkillers, antibiotics or sedatives.
Saint Ezekiel lived his illness united to Christ the patient. Now, those who go through situations of illness and suffering can turn to him and have him as an intercessor, because the saint understands them and is a valuable companion on the journey. His patience, his faith and his mature and conscious acceptance of the illness continue to help the sick of yesterday, today and ever.
