Javier Sartorius, the young Spanish aristocrat who left everything to follow Christ

Javier Sartorius Milans of Bosch was a young outgoing young man from a family of Madrid high society and a promise of tennis. However, he left everything to follow Jesus Christ and surrender to contemplative life.

With glassy eyes, Fernando Sartorius dusts in detail the memories and adventures he lived with his inseparable brother Javier, who died in peace in 2006 at 45 years after loading with the cross of the disease. His example of life, after a somewhat unbridled youth, left a mark on all those who knew him and is now in the process of beatification.

Young promises

The fate of this young Spanish seemed to be written: educated in an exclusive Jesuit school in Madrid and surrounded by luxuries between social and veranos clubs in Marbella and Zarautz, in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa. “It was like traveling on a train with marked stops: studying a good career, triumphing in business, getting married … but we got off early,” Fernando told Aci Press from the Spanish capital.

“Our adolescence was marked by bad grades. We are five brothers and I with Javier took me 11 months, so we were like a binomial. They threw us from school and there was a lot of tension at home, because my father gave much importance to the study,” he says.

At age 14 they were admitted to a school of the Escorial: “Javier was a pure nerve. I remember once, in the dining room, where we had to eat silently, he threw a knife to a picture and cracked it. Of course, they once again threw us to both of us,” Fernando recalls with some mischief.

From those years also remembers night outings and “low self -esteem”, profiled under the shadow of pressure and expectations deposited in both at birth. “One day my father arrived and gave us two round trips to the United States with a tennis scholarship. I remember the exact date, it was October 12, 1979. We were 17 and 18 years old.”

Javier began to “feel something”

In America, he emphasizes, “everything changed”, and behind the childhood between cotton. Guided by illusion against novelty and youth innocence, they undertook a path full of challenges and opportunities. They studied the race in Dallas (Texas) and later lived in Los Angeles. They triumphed in tennis, training the stars of Hollywood, and even became the best vending sellers in the United States. “We lived wildly, everything was an adventure.”

Due to their “restless spirit” they were attracted to a sect, finding in their leader, Paramahansa Yogananda, a Hindu guru and precursor of yoga in the West, the “figure of a father.”

It was then that Javier “began to feel something,” said his brother. “In Los Angeles he meditated for hours at dawn. He began to eat every week to the poor. When he returned home, he told me that in his gaze he saw holiness. He began to call his attention the simplicity and detachment of those who have nothing.”

It was then that a simple brochure, with the image of some poor children of Cuzco (Peru), caught his attention. After contacting his cousin William Hartley Sartorius, who was there to mission with the servants of the poor in the Third World, he decided to deliver a year of his life to help those in need. “And a first leg He decided to become an athlete of the spirit”.

“As in the passage of the Bible, Javier asked Jesus what he should do to enter the kingdom of heaven. He said: ‘Go home, sell everything, and follow me.’ And Javier did it. He left everything,” says Fernando.

“A brutal conversion”

Javier himself explained in a testimony broadcast on the Instagram account of Mater Mundi TV that decided to go to Peru when he realized that he had only worried about himself: “I had not given thanks to God for everything I had, I lived for me and I had forgotten the suffering of others (…) I saw through the poor that God asked me for something else.”

Javier arrived in Peru away from God, but soon hugged faith. His cousin William, who witnessed his conversion, explained that since his arrival in the Andean country “he had an affinity with poor children: he had a ability to make them laugh, to do sports and games with them, ” he says in a video of Mater mundi tv.

At the beginning of his stay, during community prayer times, Javier preferred to stay in his room. However, little by little he approached Fr. Giovanni Salerno, founder of the servants of the poor. The Bible was read from beginning to end, “as if it were a novel”, and the life of many saints. In fact, he wallowed his room with phrases that had impacted him. And one day, he decided to confess.

“It was not a confession to use, it was like a catechesis and lasted two days, until it was downloaded from all its sins of recent years,” says his cousin. They celebrated a mass in which he dressed in Blanco. “The lost sheep returned to the father’s house (…) had a brutal conversion and, not knowing where God was going to call him, he decided to start a new life,” he added.

Javier used to say that he had already lived everything and that he only wanted to surrender to God, although the idea of ​​ordering cost him, because he felt unworthy of being a priest due to his past life. “He didn’t care about money or what he was going to live. He gave everything … he had found his way and was immensely happy,” says Hartley.

A radical life away from the world

After spending a year at Toledo’s major seminar, he realized that he wanted a more radical life and therefore decided to move away from the world and devote himself to prayer in the Sanctuary of Lord, in Lleida. There he discovered a new life.

Together with his brother Fernando, another person who knew him well is his cousin and intimate friend Rosa Muguiro. “At the time he had a concern, Javier decided to leave everything and follow what he felt in his heart. For me that is the important thing,” Rosa tells Aci Press.

“I was quite impressed with the change of Javier. I had radicality, but always innocence, he was a totally innocent person, he had absence of malice and was always in a good mood. During the time in Lord he wrote many letters that none had read,” said his cousin.

Remember the occasion he went to visit Lord. “There, away from the world, he was happy. The site was made a ruin, but he didn’t care, he even set up a gym to train. I remember that he had even wounds on his knees to pray. In the sanctuary, close to the Pyrenees, it was very cold, they lived without hot water and he had the window of his broken room. For us it was a saint.”

His superiors proposed to return to the seminar and accepted, since for him obedience was a way to reach God. This time he entered the Seminar in Barcelona, ​​where he left a great imprint in his teammates.

The cross -shaped cross

In 2006, shortly before its priestly ordination, the cross was presented in the form of a disease, with a bleeding ulcer in the intestine. He was admitted to a hospital in Barcelona and later moved to the Cistercian monastery of San Miguel de Dueñas, in León, where he died on June 21 of that same year. He was 45 years old.

“Shortly before I died I talked to him and told me that I was delivered to what God would like,” recalls his cousin Rosa.

His cousin Willy says that “he never had a reproach, not a negative word. He carried his illness with simplicity, peace and obedience.”

The rector of the Interdiocesano Mayor of Catalonia from 2005 to 2018, Norbert Miracle, saw in Javier an example of holiness, and therefore decided to open the cause to recognize him as a servant of God.

A documentary about your life, Javier onlyYou will see the light in the coming months. From the hand of the producer Adauge and with the support of the community of Lord and the Pro Beatification Association of Javier Sartorius, Javier’s spiritual life and experience is shown.

“His delivery, his charity and his illusion for the discovery of what God wanted for him can be an example of life for the youth that is lost,” concludes his cousin pink.