MARIO DE CELLES, THE RESTORER

Mario De Celles, priest of the Foreign Missions Society of Quebec (SME), has been a missionary in Honduras for 55 years, from 1958 to 2013. He is now in his 86th year of youth.   

By :  ELOY ROY

Arriving in Honduras in 1958,  Mario is directly sent to the parish of Goascorán where he experiences the shock of his life. Everything hangs upside down in the parish of that dreadfully bleak town. However funny it might be from a particular angle, it is better not to talk about that terrible mess and simply laugh at it somehow. 

His first night is spent on a mucky floor where strange things are moving…But immediately the following day, Mario rolls up his sleeves and begins to clean the house from top to bottom. The house, the parish, relationships with the neighbors and the people in the countryside, everything has to be done anew. He needs a lot of tact and much patience to prove to the population that he is not a bad person. And so begins his mission of «restorer»: « restorer» of the Gospel of Jesus, « restorer» of the dignity and of the credibility of the priest, «restorer» of the reputation of the Church and «restorer» of churches.  

Mario first wholeheartedly begins to «restore» a few old churches within his huge parish. Rapidly he sets up a real «multinational» of altar boys. To those «children of the future» as he calls them, he gives scholarships and even founds a college so that they do not have to go into exile far from their region for further studies.       

Ten years later, Goascorán being actually quite «restored», Mario lands in Tegucigalpa, the capital, where he meets with great joy some of his young scholars who are now students at the University. Every year, the contingent increases. Mario accompanies and encourages those young people with his money and all his heart. For him, the youth is the future of the country and of the Church; young people come first, and we never take too much care of them.

In the capital city, he takes over the church of la Merced, « restores» it and then the church of San Cayetano parish, where he transforms the surroundings into a magnificent park and an abandoned piece of land into a superb football court. Yet, for a long time the cathedral in the city is in need of a man like Mario. The walls of the cathedral and its administration show signs of distress. The archbishop who detects Mario’s skills does not hesitate to turn over the cathedral parish to Mario. As soon as he is posted, he begins to «restore» that old ship. It is a very delicate endeavor which takes much of his time and which he carries on masterfully. Great specialists intervene, of course. At the end, the success is total. By the way, Mario «restores» also the church of San Francisco that had been closed for ages. And in the meantime, on the heights of Támara, he builds and starts for the youth a spiritual animation center that is still running at full throttle until now. 

Mario does not limit himself to «restore» churches. Being a deeply religious person and profoundly attached to his priesthood, he likes to proclaim the Good News of Jesus in simple but beautiful places. With much zeal, he encourages the communities to go beyond a superficial and folk Christianity and to discover,  on the rock of the Gospel, how Jesus is alive and working to take us from bondage to freedom, from rivalry to solidarity and from death to life.  

In Mario’s hands, money does not rot. Those monies are coming from personal benefactors, and more often from aid organizations of the German or Canadian Churches. Still, for an important part, the money comes from the Hondurans themselves, happy to collaborate in the good works of «Padre Mario». They trust his administration that is transparent as daylight, and they like to verify with their own eyes who are those who benefit from the donations and what use is made of them.

In the vast community of the children of God called «Church», we do not compare peoples, cultures or individuals. No one is greater or better or holier than the other. Some receive more, and others receive less; those who receive more share with those who receive less.  And so, for example, the money of the SME does not belong to the SME, but to the impoverished ones to whom the SME is sent to proclaim the Good News. It is for the impoverished that in solidarity some people support the SME with their donations. For its part, the SME makes its duty to administer those donations by always having in mind where those donations come from and for what purpose they entrusted them to the SME.                   

 According to Mario, the greatest service rendered by the SME to Honduras during his 60 years of presence in that country is in initiating a multitude of small Christian communities. With time, those small communities have reached a rare maturity and demonstrated without any doubt that they do not need any more to be baby-sit to pursue their route.

Mario sighs and agrees that Honduras is far from having all its demons exorcized yet. Every day, Corruption, Narco traffic and Violence (CNV) drain the country. Mario tells us that so many dead can be explained by the fact that, for centuries, nearly one half of Honduras is inimical to the other half. Because vengeance is   matter of honor and deeply rooted in the culture, vast sections in the society find themselves ensnared in a spiral of violence that has no end. That is the number one curse of that country. According to Mario, so that the country will survive, there is only one way:  to forgive one another once and for all and start again. Without a general pardon among all the Hondurans, there will never be a true social «restoration» among them. That would not be too difficult, since he knows a number of individuals and small communities who have already taken that step and are very happy about it. The hope for a new Honduras passes through the apprenticeship of a culture of pardon.     

We very well know that Honduras is not the only country in that situation; the whole world is still infested with the «CNV demons», except that, nowadays, in those countries said to be «developed», they have recycled, sophisticated and internationalized themselves. For a large part, those demons come out like rabbits from the stomach of the gigantic international economic system which leads the world by the nose. Its power is simply raving mad. It places into the hands of hardly 1% of human beings the control of more than one half of the wealth of the Earth, creating as such an abyss between that 1% and the rest of humanity. If hell exists, that is where it lies. Yet, the majority of Christians and heads of our Churches believe that, except for a few little wrongs that should  be dusted off, such a system is wanted and blessed by God; they worship it as if it was holy Providence itself. Now, it is through that damned system how all the CNV demons of the planet are created and put on fat.

The most beautiful souvenir that Mario keeps about Honduras is the respect and the affection with which the people of the country surrounded him. «The Hondurans whom I have known at close range have adopted me like one of their own, he says, and me naturally, I repaid them in kind. We became a real family».       

In 1969, when he was in charge of the Goascorán parish, which is located on the boundary between Honduras and El Salvador, a war breaks up between those two countries. Mario remembers: «I found myself in the middle of it. Much blood was spilled around me. But I still congratulate myself of having been there and of having risked my life next to my Honduran brothers. That experience of fire, blood, sufferings and of absolute trust in Jesus united us in such a way that neither great distances nor the passage of time will ever break those bonds». 

 

Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages