3 – The saint of the Beatitudes and joy

There were two very distinct features to his personality: on the one hand, he was always smiling, joyful, serene, cordial, optimistic, quick with a joke and interested in what was told him or asked of him; on the other, I have collected numerous testimonies to his suffering which came from his physical maladies and the moral trials that he had to address. In the immortal novel by Manzoni (The Betrothed, chap. IV), the author tells us of Friar Cristoforo: ‘To the solicitude for charity, which was inborn in him, was added that scrupulous concern which often torments the good’. This is a phrase that explains the torments of Marcello Candia very well.

Physically, Marcello was a robust, whole and healthy man who was resistant to tiredness. His heart problem (five heart attacks and a heart operation), insomnia, constant migraines and the devastating liver cancer of his last months were all the consequences of external factors such as excessive hard work and suffering and an acute sensitivity which blew up every problem. And yet those who knew him superficially or occasionally thought that with all the money that he had could not have had many worries! Instead, he spent all his capital during the first four or five years that he spent in Amazonia in the building and launch of the hospital in Macapà. Everything that he achieved subsequently was certainly a gift of the Providence of God but at the same time he sought out help and offerings. He went back at least once a year to Italy for this reason.

Candia lived the Beatitudes of the Gospel. Indeed his life was incomprehensible to those who thought him a ‘normal person’: he lived in virginity even though he was a handsome man; in poverty even though he was very rich (in the abjectly poor context of Amazonia he seemed to be a multi-billionaire); in humility even though he had three degrees and could aspire to posts of power and prestige; in indigence even though he had the funds to buy everything that he wanted; in a spirit of mercy that forgave not only the military men and the local dignitaries who afflicted him but also the missionaries who did not understand him and at times criticised him. Certainly one can apply to Marcello Candia the phrase of St. Paul: ‘Happy in hope, strong in tribulation’ (Rm 12:12).

And all of this was possible because he prayed a great deal. Holy Mass every day, the rosary and very many prayers and hours of adoration. God gave him the strength for a heroic life, for love of God, the poor and the least.

III) What Marcello Candia Teaches us Today

People saw him as a kind of Mother Teresa of our country and the parallel was not at all baseless. Father Giacomo Girardi, the director at that time of the PIME Missionary Centre of Milan, observed: ‘Marcello left behind him the deep mark of a lived Christianity in very many souls’. I encountered many demonstrations of this when accompanying him on his ‘winter campaigns’. He said very simple things, convincing people with his faith and his witness as an authentic lay missionary…young people above all felt his appeal’. What does the Servant of God Dr. Marcello Candia teach us still today?

I am a simple baptised man

In an interview published after his death, Marcello Candia described himself in the following terms: ‘My vocation is that of a simple baptised man. From God I have received a great deal and I must give a great deal, indeed I will try to give away everything. My charism is to give. The more I can give to other people, the more I am happy, because it is better to give than to receive. I am helped by many people and I can give a great deal, those who help me the most are those who pray for me. Each person has his own charisms. I am rich and I must make myself forgiven by God by giving everything away before I die, and not afterwards’.

The missionary vocation of Camdia arose from his meeting with Msgr. Pirovano and during his first visit with him to Macapà in Amazonia in 1950 where he then lived with the missionaries of the PIME. In Italy and the United States of America as well his homes were those of the PIME. When they proposed to him that he should be made an ‘honorary member of the PIME, he thanked them for the offer but said: ‘To be a missionary, my baptism is enough’. But for him his baptism was the point of departure for the whole of his life.

Marcello Candia was neither a bigot nor a reader of Biblical-theological studies. He was a normal Christian with a spirituality whose written sources did not go beyond the Gospel, a few religious books and the lives of saints (Teresa of the Child Jesus, Pier Giorgio Frassati) and his ‘Book of the Good Christian’ (he kept it in the pocket of his jacket) which contained the most common prayers, the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, a selection of the words of Jesus and the psalms and, at the end, about twenty ‘meditations’ of a few pages each on the principal Christian truths which ended – and Marcello know this part almost by heart – with two meditations on death, the judgement of God and heaven.

When he prayed he always referred to that small book and when he found a phrase from the Gospel or other interesting ones he copied them onto a small sheet of paper which he put in his piety book so that he could read them later and think about them. There comes to my mind the Latin motto: Timeo hominem unius libri – I fear the man who has only one book and one fixed idea. Such was Marcello Candia, but his fixed idea was one that really saved man: love for god, the imitation of Christ and love for the poor.

 In spiritual things and things of faith Marcello lived clear and certain ideas. Behind his personal history which was out of the ordinary, there was a spirituality and a virtue of an unusual kind even amongst consecrated souls. He was a man of prayer and faith. His prayer was almost childlike, his favourite cry was: ‘Lord, increase my faith!’. To those who contested him and said and wrote that through his works of charity and human advancement he helped to undermine the anger of the poor who should have engaged in a ‘revolution’, Candia answered: ‘In front of a leper or a poor man who is in front of me I cannot tell him to hope in a revolution that will come and put things right; I have to help him now and immediately’. And naturally he continued on his path, even though he suffered these contestations.

Msgr. Aristide Pirovano said: ‘In Marcello I was always struck by his prayer life. He was very active and he never stopped working, planning and speaking to convince other people; he was an engine constantly on the move. But all of this activism of his was imbued with union with God, a constant prayer that became his life, because he thought only of God, of the poor, of works of charity. I do not even know if he had other thoughts, he was in love with God and the humanity in pain whom God had made him meet’.

Those who have received a great deal must give a great deal. ‘As one must always remain young I believe that the best way to do this is to always respond to the calls of the Lord – thus in everything that the Lord has me encounter pn my journey and inspires me to do, I throw myself into it’.

The spur that led him to follow the ways of the Lord was the belief that he had received much from God and that therefore he had to give much. He always remembered the example of his parents, the upbringing that he had received, being with the Capuchins as a young man and then with the missionaries of the PIME. He saw all of this as a grace of God and in reality his first Christian formation was guided by two exceptional men (apart from his mother whom he lost when he was seventeen years of age) – Fr. Genesio and Br. Cecilio, two Capuchins who represented for him rigour, severity, Christian ascetics, the smiling face of charity, and a constant commitment to help the poor. His keenness to respond to the graces of God took practical form in love for the poor. What was amazing in Marcello was his incredible number of achievements. Listing everything that he did, that is to say the works that he created in Italy and in Brazil, would produce a list that was too long. It seems impossible that in a few years Candia put into practice all those initiatives and after founding them generously financed them as well. His brother Riccardo, who was the most specific witness to the life of Marcello, observed: ‘Ever since he was a boy he was used to having three to four tasks at the same time, each one of which would have been enough for any normal person’.

‘We receive more than we give’

Marcello Candia related that when he arrived in Macapà and Marituba and got into direct contact with the lepers and the sick people he found those men and women covered in sores repugnant. But he then went on: ‘I who believed I would find people in revolt saw that they were great examples of faith and patience, about whom one should think for the whole of one’s life and have very great admiration, thanking the Lord for that…I never saw people in revolt and this is what greatly struck me. In contact with these people I saw that an acceptance of pain is not in the least something that is forced, as was demonstrated by Adalucio (a leper). When I asked him ‘But when you meet God will you ask him the reason for your suffering?’, he answered: ‘I will not need to ask Him, I accept my situation out of faith now and I will do so in the future’ That is to say they have so much faith that they do not even ask the reason for their pain. Those men and women, who would be justified in rebelling, I saw live their pain with dignity and calm in Marituba’. And Marcello went on: ‘we receive more than we give’.

‘In what sense when going to a brother who is suffering in the flesh does he give you back more than you have given?’. Candia answered this question by saying: ‘The Lord made me understand the Gospel to the full when I read it here in Amazonia. In Italy I had already read it very many times, but only here did I understand to the full that phrase of the Lord: ‘What you did to one these little ones you did to me’. Therefore if you ask me: do we give or receive more? I will answer you: we receive much more because here I have understood the Gospel as I had never understood it. It is evident that the Gospel can be very well understood in all parts of the world, but the Lord has made it easier here: in the light of the truly extraordinary witness of people who suffer’.

The Servant of God Marcello Candia did not have timetables, he skipped meals, he slept very little, he laid stress on efficiency in his work and was a perfectionist, and he tormented his employees and those who worked with him, he wanted them to be always perfect…to sum up one could say of him what Manzoni said was said of Cardinal Federico: ‘what a holy man! But what a torture!’ Marcello, in fact, saw only the love of God and the poor.

During the last two years of his life which had already been intense there was a strong acceleration. He knew that he had little time to live and he increased the time he dedicated to his work even more. But what most strikes one about his missionary life in Amazonia was his modern and not paternalist spirit with which he lived and engaged in his works. He achieved what Cardinal Martini said about him: ‘Do everything so as to be no longer indispensable’, that is to say he entrusted everything to the Brazilians themselves. He was not in the least a rich man who gave alms to the poor but a brother who shared with the poor, formed friendships with them, and listened to them.

During the month that he spent in Italy before Christmas to speak to everyone about the mission, about the poor, about love for God, he asked for money but above all else he asked for prayers, because he said that ‘If I ask only for money I will get only money; if, instead, I ask for prayers, first I will ensure that I will receive the help of God and then the money will also arrive…’. If I think again of his simple but very steady faith I am moved. Marcello was one of those people who spoke about God as though they saw Him.

Reworked version of a radio interview with Marcello Candia for Radio Maria by Piero Gheddo

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