Lay missionary pilgrims to Bethlehem on foot from Spain, from the cross to life

Fernando Gutiérrez has undertaken a pilgrimage on foot from Santo Toribio de Liébana in Spain, where the largest the wood of the crossto Bethlehem, the place where Jesus Christ was born: “The Lord did not want to take me to life without going through the cross.”

On October 12, this Spanish lay missionary began a journey of more than 5,000 kilometers in which he will pass, among other places, through Lourdes (France), Rome and Assisi (Italy), Slovenia, Croatia, Medjugorje (Bosnia and Herzegovina) , Albania (the birthplace of Saint Teresa of Calcutta), Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel, until reaching Bethlehem of Judah, where Jesus Christ was born.

But his vital pilgrimage has gone through many stages. Raised in a Catholic family, he drifted away from God in adolescence and youth. Installed as a journalist in the Spanish city of Melilla (Africa), an intrepid vocation arose: that of a war reporter.

“I’m a little unconscious. I am one of those people who until they see the missiles nearby, they don’t know how dangerous they are,” he explains to ACI Prensa by phone, while stopping along the way on the Spanish Cantabrian coast.

There also arose, with increasing insistence, a question to God about the meaning of the suffering he saw before his eyes. At the age of 30, after a confession, she went to Calcutta, with the Missionaries of Charity.

There he entered the seminary of the Missionaries of Charity. After four years, he left everything to go to Nairobi (Kenya) in 2019. “It was a discernment that lasted many months and was hard. I said: ‘Tell me when, I’m ready.’ That’s when I began to internalize that the teacher was Him and that I had to go one step behind and slow down a little,” he details.

His stays in India have left an indelible mark on him: “In the streets of Calcutta is where I have been happiest and where I have also encountered the face of the Lord the most, in the visible wounds of the poor.”

“In picking up dying people from the street in which someone almost died in your arms, that is where I have felt most closely that it was the Lord that I had in my arms,” he remembers.

“In January 2022 I started helping pregnant girls in a landfill, in a slang”. That became a home that crystallized in the Mission of the Children of Marywhere he develops an apostolate of defense and care of human life.

“The Lord wanted it to start in Kenya, where abortion is illegal, there are the same ones as in Spain,” about 100,000 a year, he explains.

And the pro-life apostolate is deep within Fernando’s heart. Since he returned to God, Fernando made a pact: “I give you my life and you will take me to give it for the children.” That is why she makes a pilgrimage to Bethlehem, “because that is where the most important baby was born,” she emphasizes.

Last August, he arrived in Spain from Nairobi, where his mission continues, with the intention of going on foot to Bethlehem. And it was precisely while traveling the Camino Lebaniego, towards the monastery of Santo Toribio (one of the five holy places of the Catholic Church along with Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela and Caravaca de la Cruz), where he discovered where his new pilgrimage should begin.

On that path, he was accompanied by several people, including Carlota Valenzuela, a young Spanish woman who made a pilgrimage from Finisterre, near the tomb of the Apostle James in Spain, to Jerusalem in 2022.

In those days the idea came to his heart: “Why don’t I do it by making a pilgrimage from the cross to life?”

A pilgrimage entrusted to Providence

This pilgrimage “has been entrusted to the Province from the beginning,” comments Fernando, who has seen how the generosity of so many overflowed to equip themselves. They even gave him “a pen that says ‘life is born in Bethlehem’,” he says as an anecdote.

This is a style that she essentially learned from the founder of the Missionaries of Charity: “The mission in Kenya is supported entirely by Providence because I came from training with Mother Teresa, who is a teacher of Providence. That’s the little I can try to imitate her, the rest is too big for me,” she humbly confesses.

Beyond the essentials for walking and some clothes, Fernando carries a phone, which allows him to communicate and share his path through his Instagram account, @peregrinoaBelen. He left the bank card at home.

“God willing, they will welcome me, but I have to grow a lot in confidence,” shares Fernando, who hopes to grow in this virtue along the way until he reaches Assisi: “There I plan to take one more step in total dedication.”

What cannot be missing from your backpack is the encyclical The gospel of life of Saint John Paul II “to understand the mission for life in which I am embarked” and an Imitation of Christ.

“Putting God in the center, center, center of my life”

The physical journey that Fernando faces is, above all, an inner spiritual pilgrimage. In a recent meeting, the Bishop of Getafe (Spain), Mons. Ginés García Beltrán asked him a question: “What is in your heart?”

Fernando hopes, based on the experience of his friend Carlota Valenzuela, to discover that God “takes him out” of the world to say: “Come with me to walk together.” In this way, he trusts in “putting God in the center, center, center of my life and that he alone is the one who marks my life.”

“I hope to live an experience that is already being precious in that solitude, of many hours walking alone with the Lord. And I am looking for answers to the mission that the Lord has entrusted to me, to see what he tells me. Maybe when I get to Bethlehem he will tell me to turn around and go to Kenya,” he explains simply.

Perhaps the key to this spiritual adventure was offered to him by a hermit he met a few weeks ago: “The destination is not Bethlehem, the destination is heaven.”