(ANS – Rome) – On 16 August, the Manaus Province began celebrations for the centenary of the Salesian presence in Brazilian Amazonia. During a recent visit to ANS, Fr Luigi Laudato, an Italian Salesian Missionary in the State of Amazonia, recalled some stories of his life.  He spoke about aspects of the land and some of the qualities of the people to whom he had dedicated 40 years of his life.

Luigi Laudato knew the Salesians ever since his schooldays in 1953. As a young Salesian in 1966-67, when he got to know Fr Ugo de Censi and the Movimento Mato Grosso, he felt the desire to go as a missionary to those lands. “But”, he says, “when I told my Provincial of the time, he replied, ‘I’ll let you see Mato Grosso’ and he sent me to Calabria.”

His brother, Fr Franco Laudato, was already a Salesian missionary in Brazil and he began to encourage Luigi to come there, not to Mato Grosso however, where Luigi originally wanted to go, but to Manaus. Eventually, in 1973, Fr Luigi Laudato was allowed to go to Brazil. After a year and a half in the Province of Belo Horizonte, he reached Amazonia.

“At Manaus, I began teaching the seminarians”, he says. “Then I got to know Fr   Antonio Gois, founder of the Salesian Mission to the Yanomami, and I worked on the mission with them for more than ten years. The work among the Yanomani bore many fruits, first among them an increase in their number. “When we started, there were 500 in the mission; when we left after 12 years there were 1,000, and now there are almost 2,000. This points to an interesting fact: where the missionaries work, numbers increase, and not only among Catholics, but among the indigenous people in general. Where government agencies are working, the indigenous people develop various western diseases and vices.” 

He went on to say: “During the years on the missions, our main endeavour in the Rio Negro region was to defend the unique culture of the Yanomani. There was no need to teach them how to live. We sought only to prepare the young people to understand our world and, through education and work training, we taught them to make choices. Every indigenous person, from every race, should be able to make choices, and should be taught to choose consciously.”

In his 40 years in Amazonia, Fr Laudato learned to discover and to love the resources of the land, and to defend it from people who wanted to exploit it out of greed. “I don’t say this for sentimental reasons, but because this land can offer extraordinary riches if people look to the long term, instead of burning the land to provide pasture. Just to give an example – here the indigenous people know a plant called liana which produces a liquid that is more effective against malaria than quinine.  Researchers from the University of Manaus have discovered that beneath the River Amazon there is another underground river with the purest water in the world. There are frogs and serpents which produce substances that are very useful in certain medicines. One of these species alone is worth more than whole herds of cattle!”

 Fr Laudato feels indebted to the Yanomani: “I have learnt a lot from them. I have learnt in their midst to be a better priest. They also have learned. They have become less ingenuous, more aware of their rights and of their world. Between 2006 and 2008, at their request, I began working with those who will do higher studies who can then teach other Yanomani. For the future, the biggest challenge is to listen to them, instead of telling them what to do, and instead of bringing them the Gospel, to discover it in their own situation.”

Published 21/08/2013