Luigi Bolla: They clarify diocesan phase of cause of Beatification of Salesian missionary that evangelized the Amazon

Cardinal Carlos Castillo, Archbishop of Lima and Primado del Peru, closed the diocesan phase of the cause of beatification of the Salesian missionary priest Luigi Bolla, which evangelized the Amazon of Peru and was called by the indigenous “Luminous star of the road”.

At the ceremony, held on Friday, May 30 at the Archbishopric of Lima, Fr. Pierluigi Cameroni, a general postulator of the Salesians, who granted an interview with Ewtn News, was also present.

Cameroni said that Father Bolla “heard God’s call when he was very small, was 11 years old, in the Salesian oratory of Schio, in Italy. He heard a voice that told him, you will be a priest, you will be a missionary, you will walk a lot in the jungle.” “He kept in his heart is God’s call and responded to God with his whole life.”

Then the servant of God “formed to be a missionary and came to America in 1953: a first phase of his life lived in Ecuador, working with the indigenous people and then especially with the indigenous people Achuar del Peru.”

“He wanted to live the life of these indigenous people, announce the gospel, but first of all knowing his life, being one of them. To perform this task, for 10 years, he lived in a very particular way, acquiring their customs, their traditions, their rites, and among it announced the Word of God, the mystery of the Lord Jesus,” said the Salesian postulator.

The Eucharist as a paradigm of a missionary life

The priest also stressed that “the deep root” of the missionary action of Father Bolla is, above all, the Eucharist. Therefore, he continued, the last time he saw him, a few months before his death, “he spoke of the Eucharist in a very strong way, I will say mystical. He spoke of a reality that he had experienced in his heart.”

“The Eucharist, as a sacrament where the Lord Jesus will offer his life for us, is the paradigm of a missionary life that Father Bolla made.”

Cameroni also stressed that another pillar of the life of Fr. Bolla was the life of prayer, so he used to make “the monthly retirement, the spiritual exercises every year, and therefore is put as a great testimony of the announcement of the Gospel, of the defense of the indigenous population.”

To conclude and highlighting that the priest used to dress as the indigenous people, the Salesian postulator stressed that “the Church must always do, announce the gospel according to cultures, the traditions of each people.”

Who was Luigi Bolla?

Luigi Bolla was an Italian missionary who evangelized the indigenous peoples of the Amazon of Ecuador and Peru. He was born in Schio (Italy) on August 11, 1932. He made his first votes as Salesian on August 16, 1949. In 1953, at age 21, he left Ecuador. He was ordained a priest on October 28, 1959.

According to the website Salesian holinessseeing that the greatest number of Achuar was in Peru, in February 1984, he definitely passed to the Salesian inspector of Peru to work in the apostolic vicariatic of Yurimaguas, in the Peruvian Amazon.

Overlapping loneliness for the distance and absence of other Salesians; And without losing his own priest identity, he identified with the Achuar people, which he helped in his organization, promoting education, health and development. Because of the love and appreciation I had, this town came to call it “Yánkuam ‘Jinti” (Luminous Star of the Way).

He managed to end the wars between tribes and families; and managed to end polygamy and that many accept the Catholic faith. He died in Lima, on February 6, 2013, at 80.

The beatification process was opened in the Archdiocese of Lima on September 27, 2021, whose diocesan phase has just completed. Now the documents pass to the Vatican where the cause will be followed by a team led by Fr. Cameroni, who is in charge of around 70 causes.