In Pace Christi

Elio, born in Moena (Trent) on 3 April 1946, entered the Florence novitiate where he made his first profession on 9 September 1966. He was then immediately sent to Pordenone for professional training and then for a year to Sunningdale to study English. He took final vows on 9 September 1974. Meanwhile, he had been appointed to Uganda in 1971 where he spent his whole missionary life. When his death was announced, we received many impressive testimonies. Dominique Corti knew him since her childhood.

“Who is Elio Croce? In Northern Uganda, everyone knows him. Elio, Brother Elio, the Comboni Brother from Moena, who, in 1971, left his mountains his steep slopes of his native Trentino to transplant himself under the Equatorial sun, in the elephant grass of the Ugandan savannah. Moena (1,184m) and Gulu (1,100m) are at the same altitude but there could not be more different panoramas and there could never be two places with of such different appearance and customs. Nevertheless, I, who was born and grew up in Africa, in the heart of an African hospital, with my nurse Liberata who would take me to her house to share a meal of millet, my teacher Apollonia and my companions who speak to me in Acholi, the flying ants cooked after the rains to be eaten as a snack, cannot even begin to imagine among the many exceptionally great missionaries I have met, one who was as well integrated into the Ugandan countryside and its people as Brother Elio.

Elio is, in simple terms, a myth. In more than forty-five years in Africa, first as the technician in charge of Kitgum hospital, then, starting in 1985 at Lacor hospital, Elio shared all the business of the Acholi people. For them and with them he built hospital pavilions, dug wells, set up technical and agricultural activities. He shared with the Acholi the tremendous decades of guerrilla warfare. He buried their dead, travelling endless distances across the savannah with his four-wheel drive, painted white but now red due to the palpable and pervasive red dust that covers and infiltrates everything in Uganda. Every journey begins with the Sign of the Cross a Hail Mary and making sure there is on board a shovel with ropes and planks to get the vehicle out of mud-holes, as well as some tow and soap to stop any unexpected holes in the tank. Elio’s old Toyota was, from time to time, the technical rescue vehicle (like when he was informed by a local Radio and went to rescue a new-born child who had been thrown into a cesspool), an ambulance to take the wounded or sick (in times of peace as well as during the war or during the outbreak of Ebola), a hearse to help people take their beloved dead from the hospital to the village to be buried close to their huts as a protection for the living, and also as a lively minibus for the St Jude children, or an occasional taxi that collected women carrying containers of water or old women with tired and dusty feet and their heavy bundle on their heads.

Attracted, urged on and sustained by faith in Divine Providence that was tenacious, sound, and the unshakable nourishment of a life completely given, Elio, like a Tridentine  rock climber, ascends, foothold after foothold, the mountain of his African adventure, amidst the many difficulties and countless tragedies, a thousand acts of heroism during those tumultuous years, both terrible and inspiring. A glance upwards towards the summit, another around him and at his roped companions, and the ascent continues.

Elio reached Lacor in 1985 having been insistently asked for by my father who needed his talent as a builder and maintenance person to enlarge the buildings of his hospital that had to meet the enormous needs of the population.

There was an immediate understanding between my father, my mother and Elio, so great was their similarity as persons totally dedicated to the people! Each one needed the others and they could all count on each other. Together, they shared enthusiasm and new challenges. To mention but a few: the new surgical department, financed by Italian Cooperation, the large polio clinic financed by the Italian Bishops’ Conference with “eight-per-thousand”, the new paediatric facility financed by the US government, the large installations for water treatment and power, the 16 km of underground cables and pipes partly due to the help given by Bolzano Province and Austrian Catholic organisations. My father raised the funds; Elio made the plans, built the structures and maintained them while my mother did the surgery. Together they faced incursions by guerrillas into the hospital and even fired some shots into the air (including my mother who had done some years of military service in Canada) to confuse the guerrillas who were trying to break into the house of the Ugandan Sisters. Together they faced the massacres perpetrated by those people in the neighbouring villages. Elio would go off with his ambulance to collect the wounded, if there were any, and take them to Lacor where my mother and father treated their wounds. It often happened that there was nothing else to do but give a Christian burial to the dead bodies, often horribly mutilated.

His kingdom is the building sites and the workshops for woodwork or mechanical constructions and the maintenance of the electric medical equipment. During those war years, there were no supplies to be found and everything had to be homemade. Bro Elio was up to the task. He knew how to do things and to teach others but he also demanded that things should be well done. In this way he helped things to improve locally. Many were trained at his school, learning a trade and the attitude that work must be seen as an art. Needs must stimulate the search for solutions and not lower standards. Many small activities emerged from this stimulus. Those who work for him work well, learning and so set themselves free, knowing that, where necessary, they could count on Brother Elio. Many went to school with his economic help. Then, in the nineties he did something typical of him: he had helped Bernadetta, an Acholi widow who had looked after a number of war and AIDS orphans. When she died, he simply took on the work she left behind. It was Providence that brought her to his door and he would not reuse his help. Elio never once avoided a commitment. Divine Providence did not lose the opportunity to cause the ‘soft spot’ of this man that Trent had given to Uganda to be put to good use. The result was the St Jude Orphanage, the Consolation Home for children mentally and physically challenged and the Farm. Not even those who happened to pass through Lacor in the last thirty years could do so unaffected by meeting Bro Elio. His simple and concrete way of doing things, sometimes sweetly rough, uncalculatingly, with no frills and his baggage of lived African dedication emanating from this man in dusty sandals, challenges and recruits (often for life) anyone approaching him. It is impossible to remain indifferent; there is the inevitable encounter with his options and a feeling of being allied to them even where views diverge.

With the same sort of versatility, he interrupts his work of supervising work at a building site to go to the operating theatre where the Ugandan doctors who succeeded Lucille are trying to remove a rake stuck in the neck of a patient. They need his flexible grinder to cut the teeth of the rake and then remove them surgically. Bro Elio comes and does the job expertly but not without first taking a photo to add to his collection. He then leaves the doctors to do their work. This is how things are done, naturally and with simplicity, not ignoring the funny side of things but becoming personally involved and taking part sincerely and in depth in the pain of those coming to the hospital. Leaving the operating theatre, he returns to his building as Elio is mainly a builder. He was a builder of buildings but also a builder of charity, and a builder of justice. In the final analysis, a builder of peace.