The lay missionary Fernando Gutiérrez has just completed a 10 -month -old pilgrimage from Spain to Bethlehem convinced that the solution to all problems is to look at the Child Jesus.
This was explained to ACI Press in an interview granted within a few hours of his arrival in the city where the son of the Virgin Mary was born more than two millennia and where he has found accommodation in the house of a Spanish consecrated man who for a while returns to his country.
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During the conversation, the missionary explains about the pilgrimage: “Very soon the man taught me that he was going to use it as an instrument to take many souls and many eyes to Bethlehem,” convinced that “the solution to all the problems of the world is to look at the child who was born in Bethlehem.”
In this sense, he shares that we are “called to position ourselves with Jesus, never anywhere in this society or this world that polarizes us, that pushes us, sometimes aggressively positioning ourselves on one side or another.”
“Our site, despite what they say and what they attack us, is Jesus,” he adds with conviction.
On October 12, Fernando Gutiérrez departed from the Sanctuary of Santo Toribio de Liébana, where the major wood cross from the world and began walking under the slogan “from the cross to life.” They have been 10 months of road with which he tries to mature the next steps of his delivery to the Lord.
Fernando’s professional experience as a journalist, led him to develop in Melilla or Gaza – where he was as a war correspondent – a special sensitivity for childhood protection.
At 30, after a confession, he went to India to live with the congregation founded by Santa Teresa de Calcutta and entered the seminar of the Missionaries of Charity. Four years later, after an intense discernment, he left the community to go to Kenya, where he founded the Children of Mary mission (Mary’s Children) dedicated to protecting the life of children and mothers from a chabolist settlement next to a landfill.
“Pilgrimage begins now”
“From a young age I have heard that life had to be taken seriously and partly is true,” explains the missionary, who always remembers that Santa Teresa de Calcutta said that “children must be very important if God himself became a child.”
“There is a lot, I dare to say theology, in children to discover,” he says before stressing that “children are very special in God’s plan and teach us a lot.”
So much so, that the first thing when I arrive in Bethlehem has been to visit various institutions of childhood attention before dedicating a time to meditate on the future of his mission from the Holy Land: “I carry in my heart that a good season leaves me here,” he confesses.
Not surprisingly, that was the reason why he began to walk towards the place where El Salvador was born: “The call I felt was to find answers to the mission for the life that we started in Kenya 3 years ago. Well, we are going to talk about now in Bethlehem these days, the Lord and me.”
At the moment, Fernando already advances to Aci Press that he is valuing that Maria’s children have a presence in the Holy Land, where he hopes to take a replica of Our Lady of Life next Christmas.
“The pilgrimage begins now and begins like this, trusting what God is going to put on,” he adds.
A desert for the lack of Eucharist
Throughout this path, Fernando has experienced moments of reception, joy, fraternal encounter and prayer, but also of spiritual desert, especially during the last part of the pilgrimage.
“I have recovered a little when leaving Medjugorje and starting Montenegro. Albania, I recovered a little for the missioners of charity and the neocatechumenal road, which is very present in Albania, that saved me,” he says.
In Greece, the lack of Catholic churches led him to travel “a complicated desert at the welcome level, to find the Eucharist, which I found only in a city and in Patras, where San Andrés is.”
In these circumstances, Fernando has experienced spiritual lights “in which I have worked and in which I have understood why the Lord has proposed this madness,” he explains.
Temptations along the way
His very long pilgrimage has not been exempt from temptations and interruptions. Unavoidable bank matters in Kenya required Fernando’s presence when he was in Montpellier (France). He returned to Africa and soon resumed his way.
Then, other temptations arrived to make a timely visit to Madrid or return to Africa to collaborate in the organization of mission volunteers during June and July.
“There I already planted and understood that the Lord wanted us to continue in the battle, we continued together and not distract me on the way,” he shares with Aci Press.
Total delivery on Holy Thursday
Along the way, Fernando has experienced many spiritual lights.
“The day perhaps more important was in Venice, on Holy Thursday. The night of Holy Thursday, I had a very intense night of prayer and to understand what was happening and what the Lord was doing, surrendering everything, that complete delivery of Jesus in Getsemaní. He made me the gift of living it a little by his side and living it with such intensity that I looked a little my life a little and I planted myself if I was really giving everything.”
On the other hand, he adds, he has been “working a bit also in the discernment of the mission, of my personal vocation within the mission”, a task that will continue in Bethlehem.
“What I have to put on paper now when I arrive in Bethlehem, write the statutes a little as an association in Kenya, as a foundation, if we are going to be consecrated, consecrated families …”, he adds.
The solution between Israel and Hamas is that they know Jesus
It is not the first time that Fernando goes to the Holy Land and knows well the sufferings of his inhabitants, Jews, Christians, Muslims, because of divisions, misunderstandings and war.
“I have always believed and I will always believe that the solution is that they know Jesus. That the parties in conflict, whatever, accept that they are brothers and Jesus’ message to love each other,” he explains from his experience.
Until the state of Israel and Hamas terrorists do not accept it, he adds, “there will be no possibility of encounter.”
However, from its journey through Holy Land to Belén, rescues a light of hope: “This land is a land in which we all feel identified. In which we all have a part to do: Muslims, Christians and Jews we have roots on this earth. Some because our Lord was born and our Lord died and because it is the earth of Jesus. Others for Abraham, others because it is the earth to which God brought them.”
On the coexistence of the different Christian confessions, Fernando also considers that “it is no more mine Jesus than of the orthodox, or vice versa.”
Thus, he has concluded that “everything here is a miracle,” despite the war. “We can see things with hope. There is a very intense and very pretty coexistence on a day -to -day basis and in most people who cross with everyone, in the Muslim neighborhood, in the Arab neighborhood, in Jerusalem, in the old city, they all cross.”
Nicolás de Cárdenas
Born in 1980, I am a Spanish and journalist’s husband and father with more than 20 years of experience in print and digital media, specialized in socio -political and religious information. I have worked more than 10 years in defense of human rights and I have accreditations in journalism and comprehensive communication. Since July 2022, I am a correspondent for ACI Press and Ewtn News in Spain, covering international events of the Catholic Church.