The Idente Missionaries in the Philippines celebrated the 14th anniversary of the transit of our beloved Founder Fernando Rielo into heaven on Sunday, December 9, 2018 with a Eucharist celebration presided by Fr. Tomy Mundankunnel, Claretian priest, native of Kannur and friend of our Institution.
Fr. Tomy emphasized in his homily the mystical experiences that our Father Founder lived at an early age and his way of expressing it in his poems, certainly unique because they talk about his constant communion with our Heavenly Father. He underlined that for Fernando Rielo, the meaning of suffering had a different dimension from what people usually understand today as something negative.
He also noted that for the founder of the Idente Missionaries, to be physically far away from our Heavenly Father was his greatest suffering since his childhood. His suffering was united to the suffering of Christ. He said that suffering has a redeeming value and for that reason, it is important to live it in that way in our life, in family life. Christ´s suffering, his sacrifice, gives us life. And this was Fernando Rielo’s understanding, and that is why he was able to reach others. And like him, we should be co-redeemers of each other, doing and giving what is possible for us to make others happy, in other words, to give our life for each other.
He also highlighted that our experience of God should be manifested in an active way: reaching out to others and sharing with them, since all of us are children of our Heavenly Father, united to Him through Christ his Only-begotten Son. He concluded his homily saying that the work of the idente missionaries is a commitment of love: “it is not possible to help others without being motivated by a constant love and communion with God.”
In addition, he joined in the supplication of all the spiritual children of Fernando Rielo so that the Church recognize the richness of his mystical life and of the idente charism in the initiation of the process of his canonization.
After that, we watched the video “Sed Santos”, followed by a lunch in a simple family atmosphere. Members of the Idente Family, Idente Youth, Idente Volunteers and friends of our Institution were present in this celebration. This new anniversary ended with immense gratitude to our Heavenly Father for our beloved Father Founder´s life with the supplication that our prayer and our life be as he taught us: “Be aware that all the prayer of this world is summarized in only one phrase: Father, I am listening to you.”
