Brother Ettore Boschini:

the Heartbeats of a Great Heart

The death of our beloved Brother Ettore is for all of us a reason for suffering, prayer and reflection.

1. A reason for suffering, for great suffering, first and foremost. The suffering of those who esteemed, helped and loved Brother Ettore. And they are truly many in number because – in a way that was specially his, with a simple, immediate and disarming fervour and, even more, with a genuine faith – he ended up by being a  ‘puller’ of men.

The suffering above all else of those – and they are a large crowd! – who were esteemed, helped and loved by Brother Ettore one by one, each one reached personally. The suffering of those who, receiving care and esteem in their poverty and marginalisation, felt ‘redeemed’, upheld in their ‘dignity’, exalted in their human ‘nobility’, and seen as having sacrosanct ‘rights’. This is something that they themselves can say because the various forms of suffering that have overwhelmed their existences make their judgement more lucid and penetrating: from this man of charity, from this Camillian brother, they received the most valuable and rarest gift, the recovery, that is to say, of their dignity and, by this route, the igniting of a renewed trust in life.

I also think of the suffering of the religious community of St. Camillus and more broadly of the whole Ambrosian Church. I must here remember the very beautiful and moved letter that Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini sent me from Jerusalem in which he shares in the most heartfelt way in our mourning. He knew Brother Ettore ever since he entered the diocese, he met him on a very large number of occasions, he advised him, he encouraged him, and he helped him. The Cardinal writes in his letter: ‘I thus had an opportunity to admire a charity, a disinterestedness, and a spirit of sacrifice that were truly heroic, that did not step back in the face of any difficulty’. And the Cardinal goes on: ‘Such a religious – I would like to say a ‘giant of charity’ – honours the Gospel and the goodness of our people and his actions and initiatives should be remembered as some of the most important of recent years in the field of marginalisation’.

To our Church of Milan, which welcomed him immediately with benevolence and trust, Brother Ettore offered a valuable witness of great humility, of disinterested dedication, of courage, of extraordinary faith and of constant prayer, of unlimited trust in Providence, and of singular love and devotion to Our Lady, whose crown of the rosary he distributed to everyone.

I think, no less, of the suffering of the whole of the city of Milan: a city that has its contradictions, as for that matter is the case with all large and modern cities, but which is extremely vivacious, dynamic and industrious in its voluntary work for the poor, the weak, the elderly, the sick, the disinherited and the desperate.  In this city of ours, Brother Ettore became a kind of ‘institution of charity for the poor, for the ‘last of the last’’. To him ‘the whole of the city and above all the poorest of the poor owe a very great deal’ (Cardinal Martini). He founded a school. How many institutions and how many people, in various ways, took on board his lesson of charity and followed him and helped him! The spontaneous and uninterrupted flow of people in front of his coffin in recent days, involving people from all social backgrounds, all countries and all faiths, is a splendid testimony to this.

2. The death of Brother Ettore, above all now in this liturgical celebration, becomes for all of us a reason for prayer. We do not want to keep our pain inside ourselves. We want to transfer it in a certain sense to the heart itself of God. We want to make it prayer.

Yes: let all of us – each as he or she can, with simplicity and with trust – pray for Brother Ettore.  May the Lord who purified him constantly through the many trials and sufferings of life – of a moral character in particular – and who completed this purification with the leukaemia that consumed the body of Brother Ettore but not his will and his passion to live and live for other people, may the Lord receive him now – merciful and benevolent – in the imperturbable peace and the full joy of that Kingdom that He has prepared for His good and faithful servants! May God give to Brother Ettore, who never spared himself in giving food and housing to so many poor people, give him that food that never perishes – that food of eternal life – and give him His home, His own heart, as a place of protection, of love and of blessedness!

Yes: we want to pray for Brother Ettore. But we feel that it is above all he who now can, and wants to, pray for all of us, for all the poor and suffering people that he met, for all the poor and the suffering that continue to live in our city and our towns. He is in the joyous intimacy of God but his heart made indelible the signs of so much pain that was encountered and comforted here on earth. May he pray, therefore, for the Lord to make all the poor, the marginalised and the suffering of life, and all those who have lost hope feel, that he, Brother Ettore, has not in the least abandoned them and that others – with his own commitment to help, care and affection – will continue to reveal the face of a God who is the friend of man, the face of a Father who never forgets any of His children.

Our prayer and the prayer of Brother Ettors are, for all of us, an extraordinary profession of faith in the mysterious but consoling meaning that death has for believers in Christ. Indeed, death does not break links, it does not eliminate communion, it does not remove the dialogue of thoughts and affections between those who are on the different shores of the single great river of life!

3. The death of Brother Ettore is a reason for reflection, for serious and responsible reflection. In recent days more than one person, when referring to the charitable experience and the very many works of Brother Ettore, has called for his legacy not to be dispersed but, rather, scrupulously gathered up and continued. But perhaps this is the legacy that Brother Ettore, ahead of others, drew, to the full, from the Word of God, the light and strength of his life, in great and small, known and unknown, deeds. It is the legacy that was drawn from the Gospel, from that living and personal Gospel that is Jesus Christ himself, the crucified Christ who gives all of himself for love. O, that red cross that he, a son of St. Camillus, with simplicity and pride, always wanted to show to everyone! Is this not perhaps the most eloquent and strongest sign that it is there, only there, in the Body given and the blood shed of the Lord on the cross, that there is the spring and the strength for a life of tireless and disinterested dedication to the poor and the afflicted – the life that Brother Ettore lived?

We have listened to the words of the Evangelist John: ‘By this did we understand love: the Son of God gave his life for us; therefore we must also give our lives for our brethren’ (1 John 3:16). ‘My children, our love must not be just words and talk; it must be true love which shows itself in action’ (v. 18). Above all there have come down to us the – at the same time – most authoritative, fascinating and powerful words of Jesus: ‘He who wants to save his own life, will lose it; but he who loses his life for my sake will find it’ (Matthew 16:25).

It seems to me that the witness of Brother Ettore is incontestable: he believed in those words and made them ‘flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood’. He made himself ‘the last with the last’. He did not only ‘welcome’ them. He also ‘sought them out’: they were sought out because of love and faith, as living and palpitating images of the Son of God who became man and made himself mysteriously present in every poor and suffering person, in those who are hungry and thirsty, are strangers and naked, sick and in prison (cf. Matthew 25:35ss).

‘Father of the poor’ – this is how one newspaper defined Brother Ettore. In truth, it should be said that the Bible applies this appellation only to God, the Pater pauperum to the utmost. But Brother Ettore was, with all his charge of humanity and because of a great gift of God and His love, a particularly shining, credible and effective transparency of the infinite, merciful and compassionate fatherhood of God.

And it is he, Brother Ettore, that we would like to have the last word. He pronounced it on the occasion of a launch of a book on his work. It is a word that almost has the character of a spiritual testament: a word that sounds out on his lips, a word that communicates the heartbeats of his great heart, the heart of a man, of a believer, and of a religious.

‘I would like to convince you that I am only a poor man. A man who for the whole of his life has only done the will of God, often without even realising the fact. From the Lord I have received extraordinary graces, but I cannot boast that I have always corresponded the great graces that I have received. I say this so that nobody, and I repeat nobody, even the last of my guests, will feel inferior to me or think that he is not able to do things such as those which I, by the grace of God and through the extraordinary love of the Mother, have been able to do…

If I were to tell you about my health you would find that you would have to believe that throughout my life I have had good health for  only a very few days. I can tell you that suffering has never left me. But I have accepted everything with serenity because the great graces of God are always matched by great crosses. I would like to say to everyone that with the help of God and with the love of the Virgin nobody can fail to do his duty as a Christian. Faith, hope and charity are three virtues that live together. Nothing is impossible for God, the angel said to Mary at the moment of the Annunciation. So it is with us if with faith in the Virgin we say ‘yes’ to the various requests that God makes to us each day. Even though these requests require humiliations, hard work, pain and death.

Lord, shine forth your face on us and we will be safe’.

Brother Ettore in a broadcast of the programme Superflash directed by Mike Bongiorno

Read here the press information