In Pace Christi

Fr. Giuseppe Mariani was born at Seregno, in the Province of Milan, on 17 June, 1930. He entered the minor seminary at Crema and Brescia, took first vows at Florence in 1948 and, on 26 May, 1956, was ordained in Milan.

Before being appointed to the missions he spent a short period in Spain at San Sebastian. In 1959 he left for the city of Esmeraldas, in Ecuador where he spent his first 22 missionary years.

After almost three years as Director of the College of the Sacred Heart, he was elected Director of Boys’ Town, a post he held for eight years while assisting the Bishop as Vicar General. From 1978 to 1981 he was in charge of the means of social communication. As Vicar General, he had an exceptional ability to treat the confreres and diocesan clergy with affection, respect and dignity.

Esmeraldas was the headquarters of a Province as big as Lombardy. The only asphalt road was that leading to the capital, Quito. All the other roads required a certain familiarity with the equine mode of transport and canoeing, on rivers often in flood and with unusual means of communication. Quito then had about 120.000 inhabitants, mostly coloured people. Only one or two tribes, such as the Cayapas, native to the region of Esmeraldas, still kept their original appearance and ancient customs.

A common denominator among the ethnic groups living in the city was poverty, whose offspring is despairing lawlessness. For Fr. Giuseppe, the first priority was the pastoral care of the nearby villages.

In 1961, Bishop Angelo Barbisotti entrusted the care of the boys of the House of Correction for Minors of Esmeraldas to Fr. Giuseppe. There were about thirty inmates with previous convictions and living in terrible conditions. Fr. Giuseppe himself gives us a devastating description of the place. “The place where they live would not be worthy to be called even a stable where we come from. They are clothed in rags. I had to buy almost all the kitchen utensils besides chairs and sheets. Three days later they were all gone again: the boys themselves had stolen and sold them”.

After his experience in the reform school, the missionary work of Fr. Giuseppe continued in acting on behalf of the youth so as to form generations of people who, as far as possible, free of unemployment and sicknesses and having a more solid culture, might be a sign of hope for the abandoned community of Esmeraldas. It was with this in mind that “Boys Town” was started in August, 1962. The aim was to provide a home and the human warmth of a family to the many boys who wandered the streets of the city with no one to care for them. The idea was original: the boys were divided into groups of not more than ten living in a house with a Comboni Brother or a lay assistant representing the father. As relations and an ordered life developed, this would become a real family. Study and work were the two activities meant to transform these boys. Fr. Giuseppe greatly loved the work and this was shown in the words he used to say goodbye to his friends when he was about to return to Esmeraldas after a brief period of rest at Seregno in the summer of 1967. “I am going back to my ‘Boys’ Town’ where I learned to love so many poor, unhappy children who have never had anything in life and who, for the most part, have nobody to care for them. They are the children of everyone; for this reason, these boys are my children and also of each one of you”.

He then took on another project of youth promotion, or rather the promotion of infants. The Comboni Institute, in fact, intended to open a centre to receive abandoned infant orphans. Thus, ‘Child’s Town’ was started and came to have 110 needy orphans in its care. Fr. Giuseppe’s pride and joy were the hundreds of children who, in the thirty years of since its inception, emerged as independent and changed youths with High School diplomas and about twenty, mostly women, with a university degree entitling them to exercise a profession.

In recent times the “Boys’ Town” was handed over to the local administrative and ecclesial authorities. Fr. Giuseppe did not feel cheated, convinced as he was that his “Boys’ Town” would continue to develop in the hands of others.

Even this was not enough for our inexhaustible Fr. Giuseppe. At the same time he participated in a project carried out by Italian and Spanish missionaries to provide an answer to the problem of those with different physical and mental abilities who, in that area, were kept in the homes since they were considered a curse by their families. In 1978, therefore, a large building was constructed and inaugurated where these children could be welcomed and looked after. This was the start of “The John Paul II Institute of Special Education for Children”.

The good relations with the people of the city and those of the villages and their gradual and continual approach to religious practice was what fuelled the work of Fr. Giuseppe, enabling him to continue working in such a difficult environment. In 1967 he noted with satisfaction: “The 68 communicants recorded in the period of Easter 1955 has now been transformed into hundreds of daily communicants. In Esmeraldas there are four parishes where there are 18 Masses on Sundays but these are not enough to cater for all the people coming. Baptisms are too numerous to count”.

In those days there was the need of a reference point, both from the social and the welfare side, considering the hard times afflicting the people. “Economic conditions are very poor as are things in the moral sphere. The consequences are always the same: violence, hunger and disease which strike the weakest and the defenceless. Data published by UNICEF show that 46% of the population of Ecuador lives on less than a dollar and a half a day; inflations is running at over 60%. The greatest cross of all is borne by the sick who have no medicine or money to buy it. The Jubilee year will give us little to be happy about”.

Fr. Giuseppe did not stay all his time in Ecuador. In 1984, the Comboni Institute recalled him to Italy and appointed him to work with EMI, the Bologna-based publishing house run by the cooperative efforts of all the missionary Institutes present in Italy. He stayed in Italy until 1992 when the demands of the mission required him to return to Latin America. This time his destination was changed. He was no longer to work in Ecuador but in Colombia (then all one Province) in the city of Cali. “This is one of the largest cities of Colombia and is, unfortunately, a city with one of the highest crime rates in the world: it is where the famous drug-trafficking ‘Cali cartel’ was started and where the law is not easily applied”.

At the end of 1995, Fr. Giuseppe returned to his never forgotten Esmeraldas, where he was to endure once again the extremely difficult period of the Ecuadorian economic crisis. Having entered the new millennium, he appeared happy with the spiritual work done and the results obtained. “On the twelfth of this month (January 2000), we celebrated a great feast for the ordination of four deacons – something never seen before in Esmeraldas”.

With his boundless energy, Fr. Giuseppe started another initiative directed towards giving a voice to the masses in despair: Radio Esmeraldas. The idea of a diocesan radio station was due to the considerable experience in journalism of the Bishop of Esmeraldas Mgr. Enrico Bartolucci who firmly believed in the power of the radio.
Today the station is called “Antena Libre” and is one of stations with most listeners in Esmeraldas.

During the following years, he would return to Seregno more frequently, taking in even the times of solemn celebrations of his forty years of priesthood in 1997 and then his fifty years of priesthood in May, 2006. In 2010, Fr. Giuseppe returned for good to Italy and was sent for treatment to the Ambrosoli Centre in Milan, where he died on 8 August, 2012.
Fr. Alberto Doneda defined him as: “A real gentleman, intelligent, responsible and able to cultivate lasting friendships. He assisted many children and young people in their education and helped numerous needy families”.