We are capable of the worst and the best. The congregation of La Salle has received a hard blow following the accusations of the writer Alejandro Palomas, who opened Pandora’s box when he pointed out a religious and teacher of this institution, brother Jesús Linares, as the sexual predator who he had raped her when she was eight years old. There are people like brother Linares in the world. But also like brother Adriano.
Both have already died, but if there is paradise, only the second will have entered it. He also belonged to La Salle, but without tarnishing its name. I have never been and will never be closer to a saint than the day my friend Marcel Joan i Alsinella, then the right-hand man of the director of the Generalitat’s penitentiary service, took me to meet him in a residence in Hospitalet de Llobregat.
It was there. Serious, humble, austere, not wanting to talk about himself, always avoiding any prominence. “I am not news. Journalists should talk about people who need help. These are indeed important”. “Who?” I asked anxiously. The answer would deserve a marble frontispiece in schools, courts, parliaments, stations and public squares…
“Prostitutes, thieves, pickpockets, drug addicts, the abandoned, the…”. The activities of this saint, who died in 2006, at the age of 86, were not always understood by altar-goers. They did not accept that he wandered between brothels, prisons, hospitals and bars. His offices, he said, remembering that “Christ was behind bars and died among thieves”.
The name of Adrià Trescents and Ribo does not say much about the Raval, his Raval. But just the mention of Brother Adriano, as he is remembered and as everyone called him there, still today evokes waves of gratitude and veneration. He stayed up almost until the end of his days to lend a hand in the school canteen at the Joan Salvador Gavina center, where children from very needy families went and have breakfast every morning.
Then he distributed sandwiches, money and comfort among the women on the street. Prostitutes adored him. Someone, when she got pregnant, said to him: “I’ll make you a grandfather!” Many, affected by drugs, age and the passing of men, asked him to hug and kiss them to feel love. true love And he did. Everything about him was goodness, despite the fact that it had to go against his most rooted principles.
There were prostitutes who had abortions and who asked him to accompany them so that they would not feel alone that day. I didn’t idealize anyone. Nor was it stigmatizing. He was just helping. With a plate, with a little money or company. Or with their prayers. Sometimes he 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 boarding house.
Since the writer Alejandro Palomas made his complaint I have criticized the previous management of La Salle, who tolerated or looked the other way when the abuses were committed. But for there to be souls like that of brother Adriano, perhaps there must be others. There is no light without darkness. Having evaded earthly justice (the accused died in October, at the age of 90, without answering the charges), the best form of revenge is to compare him with brother Adriano.
He was born in 1919 in Guissona (Segarra). The Civil War interrupted his novitiate. He was on a prison ship, in concentration camps and on the Ebro front. After the war he was able to continue his civil and religious studies. In 1946 he consecrated himself in perpetuity to La Salle. He worked as a teacher at the congregation school in Cambrils, La Salle Bonanova and La Salle Barceloneta.
From 1976, once he retired (that is, if the saints retire), he consecrated 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 set foot in in 1972, when he ran a juvenile center and took children to visit their parents. One of the things that hurt him the most was the lack of opportunities and the inherited poverty.
Many of those children ended up occupying the same cells their parents had been in and others like their parents. He had words of comfort for everyone. “What would happen to us if we had to live in their circumstances?”, he wondered. Thanks to people like him we discovered 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 every year he detailed what he had spent on, down to the last penny. 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 Cross of Saint George in 1996 with the support of eight religious orders, four bishops and an archbishop, in addition to countless individuals and countless scattered
A took advantage of the holidays to visit prisons outside Catalonia, from Puerto de Santa María to El Dueso. 17 years ago, in February 2006, he suffered an embolism after interviewing a prisoner in Lleida. A month later, his flame went out. His last will, and last act of generosity, was to give his body to science. They have not named him beat or cal. They won’t sanctify him either, but that was it. A saint today.
This report updates the version published on our website on Friday, March 18, 2022
www.lavanguardia.com/comer
Canal Comer
