Ildefonso Escribano de la Torre was born in Villanueva de Alcardete (Toledo) in 1933 and has been a missionary in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) since shortly after singing Mass in 1959. He lives in a favela in his parish.
Father Ildefonso Escribano has joined “Humanists of the eBible” for the poetic and spiritual value of his work. His poetry is full of originality, both in its experimentation with form and in its mystical and humanistic content. His life is also an example of dedication to the most disadvantaged.
Ildefonso describes his life in these terms:
“Since I was ordained a priest, I left as a missionary and have been living ever since in the troubled favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the underworld of our city, where wheat and weeds grow together. It was Karl Marx who said that in history, as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life. In the favela, life struggles hand-to-hand with death.”
“It confirms my faith and brings me great joy to hear Pope Francis urging the Church to go out to the existential and geographical peripheries of our society. That is where I am and where I have been all my life.”
“Being poor, living with them, sharing their suffering, witnessing so many struggles and failures. And in the midst of all that turmoil, being a presence of the Gospel. That is the great challenge.”
“My verses are cries of faith born of the helplessness (and also the resistance) I feel in the face of a reality that is beyond my strength.”
“Confess with your lips, believe with your heart, testify with your hands. You cannot mutilate that process. This is a path of no return.”
Despite everything, drugs, violence, death, God still has a place in the favelas.
With the sound of bullets and guns in the background, Ildefonso writes poetry full of spirit and beauty. The mystical feeling captured in his books has not been savored in seclusion, but in his apostolate among the poorest of Rio de Janeiro. That is why he asks God several times the same question that Jesus asked on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” Ildefonso Escribano has given his life to the abandoned, to those “left by the hand of God,” as he says we say in La Mancha. But he has comforted, educated, and fed them. In this way, he has cultivated his faith, hope, and charity, doing “works, works,” as St. Teresa said.
