Fernando, the Spanish missionary and pilgrim who left everything for abortion children

When at age 18 Fernando Gutiérrez decided to “enclose his faith in a drawer” to, as he believed, enjoy and deliver his youth to the party and drugs, he would never have imagined the plan that God had for him.

Just arrived in Rome walking from Spain to Bethlehem, with his feet cracked and wrapped in pilgrim sandals, the Spanish missionary travels with a tired face but looked brilliant his last years, reflecting a life offered entirely to the will of God.

That vacuum of his youth was vanished by being a witness “of the gospel in living flesh” and of the infinite mercy of God in the faces of the weakest during his years as a journalist in Melilla for Popular TV, and his experience as a correspondent in the Gaza War. Since then, Providence was weaving its path and joining the pieces of a puzzle still without finishing.

A few steps from Vatican Fernando remembers in conversation with ACI Press the question that was repeated in his head again and again: “What does God mean to me with all this?” It was then that he decided to go to Calcutta, in India, to volunteer with the Sisters of Charity. “In my heart was Mother Teresa since she was little. His radicality always caught my attention,” he says.

“It was the happiest year of my life”

“As soon as I stepped on the floor of Calcutta I knew that I was going to stay. I broke up crying when I realized that this radicality and the service to the poorest of the poor was true. I left everything and I stayed in India, something in my heart told me not to separate me from the sisters. It was the happiest year of my life,” he tells after she outline a smile.

And it was there, between Saris and streets full of dying and children without hardly present or future, where the Holy Spirit illuminated him again. “I understood that the children had always been the thread of my life.”

In fact, I dreamed of having a nursery and for a while living in Madrid, he also volunteered with children with Down syndrome.

“In Calcutta I understood that the Lord asked me to help the children of abortion to the Virgin, and that she would take them to Jesus. I knew where she wanted to go, but I did not know how,” he explains after recounting that this episode was crucial to join the missionaries of charity in Kenya (Africa).

Fernando entered the congregation making a “little agreement with God”: “I told the Lord to give my life and I asked him to take me to give it for the children. That was the agreement we reached.” And God seemed to accept the deal.

Among the landfills of the slums (Marginal neighborhoods), where they helped the pregnant women and the children to move forward, Fernando found a special person who responded to the name of Maria, a girl with cerebral palsy that presented a problem of severe malnutrition.

“She was the instrument that the Lord used to revolutionize everything, I knew that she was the ‘star of Bethlehem’. I was willing to leave my formation and dedicate myself to care for Mary, even if it was the only thing I had to do the rest of my life,” he says.

The birth of Mary’s Children

That providential encounter was the seed of what eventually became Mary’s Children Missiona mission to help pregnant women or with minor children in their charge, especially those who are in a situation of marginalization, poverty and insecurity. “It was founded by the Virgin Mary and thanks to this girl named Maria,” adds Fernando.

The project was consolidated through The children of Maryan association registered in Spain to channel material and economic aid to support the mission in Africa.

But there were still many pieces of the puzzle: “Now that the mission was dedicated to children, I felt that it was best to go to the source of life and where the most important baby was born. I had to go to Bethlehem in search of answers to the mission that the Lord has entrusted to me, and what better than going to the source of life to understand it.”

“From the cross, to life”

Five months ago, Fernando He began his pilgrimage to Bethlehem From Santo Toribio de Liébana, northern Spain enclave where the largest is preserved wood crossrelic of the true cross. “I understood that the Lord showed me that there was no life without a cross. I wanted to take me first to the cross and then go to life,” he says.

He describes that the road, more than 5,000 kilometers, has so far been “a constant demonstration that the Lord is there and that this pilgrimage is yours.”

“It is also being a faith proof,” says Fernando before confessing that what it costs him most is “walking towards a place without knowing what awaits me and without having it controlled.”

When leaving behind the eternal city will go to the home of San Francisco de Asís, to continue towards Slovenia, Croatia, Medjugorje (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Albania (the native homeland of Santa Teresa de Calcutta), Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria (to fulfill his “dream as a journalist”), Jordan and Israel Jesus Christ

“If the Lord asks me to stay in Bethlehem, I am very open to it. Only the Lord knows what will happen,” says Fernando.