We are capable of the worst and the best. The La Salle congregation has suffered a severe blow as a result of the denunciations of the writer Alejandro Palomas, who opened Pandora’s box when he pointed out a religious and professor of this institution, brother Jesús Linares, as the sexual predator who raped him when I was 8 years old. In the world there are people like brother Linares. But also like brother Adriano.
Both have already passed away, but if there is a paradise, only the second will have entered. He also belonged to La Salle, but without muddying his name. I have never been and will never be closer to a saint than the day my friend Marcel Joan i Alsinella, at the time the right-hand man of the director of the Generalitat’s prison service, took me to meet him at a residence in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat .
I was there. He is serious, humble, austere, without wanting to talk about himself, always avoiding the spotlight, the center of interest, any leading role. “I am not news. You journalists have to talk about people who need help. Those are important.” “Who?” I asked anxiously. The answer would deserve a marble frontispiece in schools, courts, parliaments, stations and public squares…
“The prostitutes, the hustlers, the pickpockets, the drug addicts, the abandoned, the homeless, the…”. The activities of this holy man, who died in 2006 at the age of 86, were not always understood by the meapilas. They did not accept that he wandered between brothels, prisons, hospitals and bars. His offices, he said, remembering that “Christ was in jail and died among thieves.”
The name of Adrià Trescents i Ribo does not say much in the Raval, his Raval. But the mere mention of Brother Adriano, as they remember him and as everyone called him there, still arouses waves of gratitude and veneration today. He got up early until almost the last of his days to lend a hand in the school canteen of the Joan Salvador Gavina center, where children of very needy families went and go for breakfast every morning.
Then he distributed sandwiches, money and comfort to the women on the street. The prostitutes adored him. Someone, when she got pregnant, told her: “I’m going to make him a grandfather!” Many, worn out by drugs, the years and the passing of men, asked him to hug and kiss them to feel affection. Honey really. And he did. Everything in him was good, even if it had to go against his principles.
There were prostitutes who had abortions and who asked him to accompany them so they wouldn’t feel alone that day. She did not idealize anyone. She didn’t stigmatize either. He was just helping. With a plate of food, with a little money or with his prayers. He sometimes prayed that an old prostitute would find a client. Or for a pickpocket to find a good pocket with which to pay for a night in a pension.
Since the writer Alejandro Palomas made his complaint, I have criticized the previous leadership of La Salle, who tolerated or looked the other way when the services were committed. But for there to be souls like Brother Adriano’s, perhaps others must exist. There is no light without darkness. Mocked by earthly justice (the defendant died in October, at the age of 90, without responding to the charges), the best form of revenge is to compare him with brother Adriano.
He was born in 1919 in Guissona (Lleida). The Civil War interrupted his novitiate. He was on a prison ship, in concentration camps and on the Ebro front. After the war was over, he was able to continue his civil and religious studies. In 1946 he dedicated himself in perpetuity to La Salle. He worked as a teacher at the congregation’s school in Cambrils, La Salle Bonanova and La Salle Barceloneta.
From 1976, once retired (that is to say: the saints never retire), he dedicated himself in perpetuity to another religious profession: that of the disinherited. By then he was already known in practically all the prisons in Spain, which he began to step on in 1972, when he ran a center for minors and took children to visit his parents. One of the things that hurt him the most was the lack of opportunities and inherited poverty.
Many of those children ended up occupying the same cells in which their parents and others like their parents were previously locked up. He had words of comfort for everyone. “What would be of us if we had had to live their circumstances?” He wondered. Thanks to people like him, we discover the other side of the Moon and that in the society of opulence and waste there is also room for the Fourth World.
He received donations and each year he detailed what every last penny had been spent on. He also published a dozen books, always under the pseudonym HAL (from brother Adriano Luis). Although he never wanted honors, he could not avoid being awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1996 with the support of eight religious orders, four bishops and one archbishop, as well as countless individuals and countless ragged people.
He took advantage of the holidays to visit prisons outside of Catalonia, from Puerto de Santa María to El Dueso. 16 years ago, in February 2006, she suffered a stroke after meeting with a prisoner from Lleida. A month later, his flame went out. His last will, and last act of generosity, was to donate his body to science. They have not named him blessed nor does he need to. They won’t hallow it either, but that was it. A saint of today
This report updates the version that our website published on Friday, March 18, 2022.
