In Pace Christi

The confreres of his community in Brescia affectionately called him “master.” And a master he was. Fr. Enzo Canonici was a master because he left us many instructions and examples of the Comboni Missionaries’ life. He was a teacher of spirituality and missionary spirit, of goodness and understanding, of humility and prayer. He was a master of obedience, humble obedience, but intelligent and creative at the same time. It was exactly this spirit of obedience that prompted his superiors to ask of him a variety of services. Fr. Enzo accepted all of these appointments and discharged them with determination.
He was spiritual director and formator in Italy, Spain and Mexico. He formed people by example and his authenticity gave him authority.
He was a shepherd. The years he remembered with great joy and nostalgia were those he spent in pastoral work in Baja California and in Netzahualcoyotl, in the heart of Mexico. As a good shepherd he loved the people and his love was returned. In his pastoral approach he gave priority to the formation of leaders, to a serious and deep catechumenate experience, and to groups of Bible meditation and study. “The word – he wrote – is life; the word changes hearts and minds; the word draws to Christ even the most hardened lives. The word changes water into good wine.”
Perhaps his most significant witness for us was his way of being a Comboni Missionary. He was proud of being a Comboni Missionary and as such he had four loves: Comboni, the mission, the Institute and his confreres.
He loved the mission, not only as a geographical place, but above all as “a privilege that he had received from Christ, the evangeliser of the Father.” He loved the missions with the availability of the Virgin Mary in serving God in all things and always. In his notes we often read his favourite sentence: “totus tuus sum et omnia mea tua sunt.”
Even during his service as superior of the Curia in Rome (1989-1995), a service which he always considered a heavy cross, his real dream was to return to the missions. Eventually in 1998 Fr. Enzo received the joyous obedience that all Comboni Missionaries await: to return to the missions. A heart failure dosed his dream, but not his hope. In 1999 he was definitely assigned to the Italian province. He wrote: “I bow to obedience. Fiat, fiat!” A few months before his death he again asked to go to the missions. His desire always was to die on the battlefield like a good soldier. But God had different plans. His heart began again to play tricks and Fr. Enzo accepted everything as a sign of God’s will. He concentrated all his energies on carrying on his missionary program in Italy by transforming his illness into a form of apostolate.
As an instrument, beside the Bible, he used the book he had written for the sick: “The suffering that saves.” The book was well received by the sick and the elderly and has already reached the fifth printing. Fr. Enzo stuck to this apostolate till the end. Death did not surprise him, because he had been waiting for it for a long time: “Each day – he used to say – could be the beautiful day of the meeting with the Father.” The meeting took place in Milan on 9 March. Fr. Enzo was 72 and had been a priest for 48 years, as he was born on 30 June 1931 and had been ordained priest on 26 June 1955.
Fr. Enzo loved flowers. But we have seen the best flowers in the garden of his lifelong witness. Without doubt, the most abundant were the flowers of simplicity and humility. He was humble, in a Marian way that had helped him to transform himself into availability and service to God and his brothers. He added a beatitude to those proclaimed by Jesus: “Blessed are the useless, because they are needed. God works wonders through the humility of his servants.” This is the beatitude that is often quoted in his letters.
And next to humility we find the flower of prayer. By his prayer, faithful constant and extensive, he became a reminder to the confreres of the importance of taking nourishment from that daily bread that Comboni had offered to his missionaries.
Dear Fr. Enzo, we thank you for the goodness you have sowed in our hearts. God is happy with you. And so are we.”