In Pace Christi

Rodolfo Fabián was born on 10 December 1970 at Ibarra (Ecuador) into a poor family with deep Christian values. Rodolfo was always very proud of his family and his Afro culture. He met the Comboni Missionaries while he was a member of a youth group called “Un camino llamado Amistad”. He was admitted to the postulancy shortly before his eighteenth birthday. He completed his preparatory schooling and studied Philosophy at the Pontifical University of Ecuador, not without some difficulty in the more abstract fields. While his formators judged him to be good, generous, helpful and gifted with apostolic zeal, they still advised him to spend some time outside the seminary, before the novitiate, to put to the test his rather idealistic approach to the missionary vocation and to improve some aspects of his communitarian relationships. This period had a positive result and Rodolfo entered the novitiate at Huánuco (Peru).

Having made his first profession on 1 May 1995, he went to Rome to study theology and, even before his final profession, he was appointed to Mozambique where he had the opportunity to express his beginner’s missionary enthusiasm especially in accompanying the youth and in the training of catechists.

Let us now turn to the testimony of Fr. Claudio Zendrón who was his provincial superior and who accompanied him as a friend for a number of years: “After his first missionary experience – a period of three years – in Mozambique, Fr. Enea Mauri appointed him to El Carmen (Manabí, Ecuador) to provide pastoral assistance to the many rural Christian communities. Even though he was at times rather intransigent, he was very willing and faithful in his devotion to the people. He loved manual work and wanted the chapels and evangelization centres to be in proper order. For this he urged the local authorities and even the mayor to collaborate with the communities. The people were very fond of him and, despite occasional disagreements, they were deeply moved by his death. Fr. Rodolfo fought on behalf of the poor and also sided with them when they took over some unused land to build houses for the needy. Communities like Puerta de Oro, Unidad de Palma Sola and Paraíso Pita are grateful to this day for what he did for them. Fr. Rodolfo was transferred from El Carmen to the mission of San Lorenzo (Esmeraldas), where he devoted himself especially to the outlying chapels located among tumbledown shacks, using some of his time to help boys and young men who had no schooling to learn at least the rudiments of a trade, especially carpentry. To this end he himself began to study auto-mechanics so as to be of help to others in this field … When he would return from Brazil to Ecuador on holiday, he would visit the families of his old mission and spend a few weeks preparing the children to receive the Sacraments. He once confided in me that when he received his diploma, he won a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba. Nevertheless, his missionary desire and the proposal of Fr. Raffaello Savoia to become involved in the pastoral of his Afro people led him to choose the Comboni vocation”.

He died at Quito, rather suddenly, due to a pulmonary embolism, at the age of 49, on 22 December 2019.
Da Mccj Bulletin n. 282 Suppl. In Memoriam, gennaio 2020 pp. 136-139.