In Pace Christi

Fr. Tommaso Bini: in the evening of 24 November the following message was sent out from Verona: “Fr. Tommaso Bini died of heart failure in the parish of Trevenzuolo, Isola della Scala, where he went for ministry. There was no time even to take him to the hospital”.

Fr. Tommaso was born on 8 March 1938 in Rivarolo Mantovano. After spending eight years in the diocesan seminary of Cremona, he joined the Comboni Missionaries. He made his novitiate in Gozzano and took his first vows on 9 September 1959. He studied theology in Venegono and Verona. Ordination followed on 30 March 1963.

Fr. Tommaso worked in Balsas, Brazil North East, from 1963 to 1974. Transferred to Italy, he worked in Pesaro and Naples (1974-1977). In 1977-79 he worked again in Brazil North East. From 1979 to 1982 he was back in Italy, first in Arco, then in Rome for a renewal course, and finally in Messina.

From 1982 to 1999 he spent most of his time outside the community and asked to be incardinated in the diocese of Caxias do Maranhão, Brasil North-East.

In 1994 Fr. Tommaso returned to Italy to join the Olivetan Benedictines of Lendinara (Rovigo). He was with them for two years, but he had to leave them on account of health: he had been suffering from diabetes for a long time. He tried again with the same Order at S. Miniato al Monte, Florence, where the climate was better, but with the same results.

In 1997 he went back to Brazil North-East, but from January 2000 he was permanently transferred to the Italian province, partly for his ill health. He was first at Cordenons and, for the last couple of months of his life, in Verona. He died at Trevenzuolo on 24 novembre 2001.

After one of his departures for Brazil he wrote: “I left in a hurry… I only had time to pack and say goodbye to my brothers, not my relatives… I suffered the winter cold of Switzerland and the damp heat of the Amazons… but thanks to God I survived. But our journey must always be marked by crosses”.

In 1981 the Superior General wrote to him: “Dear Fr. Bini, I remember the struggles and difficulties that you faced in Brazil… I thank you for the good you have done so far, first in Brazil and now in Arco and I wish that these good works will gain for you the merited peace of the heart”.

During the time of his experience with the Benedictines (August 1996) he penned some reflections on what a community should be: “It is true that St. John of the Cross says that it is through the community that the soul is smoothed over into a pure diamond, and one confrere is the file, the other is the hammer, the other is the anvil or the saw or the scissors. But I do not agree, because I have meditated even too much on our Rule of Life which says that the community must give witness to the Trinitarian Family”.

From some observations he made on theology, referring in particular to his field of activity in Brazil, he writes, “Wanting to free people from structures of death, we work in the material sphere and we do not answer the deeper yearnings of the human spirit, thus closing it to the supernatural. … At times we give earthly bread to the poor in Latin America, but we do not offer sufficiently the Bread of life… God is not in heaven, but in the suffering brother. An incarnated theology, rather than in the sufferings of the crucified Christ, takes interest in the passion of the poor in whom Christ now suffers”.