The unforgettable father Pepe Gómez Izquierdo left a legacy of integrity

By Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel *

He was the last of the five Gómez Izquierdo brothers and his mother’s darling. He lived in the family house – made of wood – in Malecón and Sucre, and prepared his first communion with Father Benigno Chiriboga. On the happy day, he listened attentively to Monsignor Rousilhe’s sermon and, upon returning home, on a chair, he repeated it with great grace and memory to his relatives, a feat that caused the consequent hilarity and surprise.

He was an intelligent and dreamy boy who wanted to go on trips. In the mornings he used to read the newspapers to his father while he shaved in the mornings and in the afternoons he would look out to see the majestic Chimborazo in the distance, until in 1936 his father was attacked with encephalitis and died almost immediately.

Orphanhood made him serious and thoughtful. He entered the Vicente Rocafuerte, and the following year, the San Gabriel boarding school in Quito, where Father Eduardo Vásquez Dodero once told him: “You have a priestly vocation”, although the bustle of those years like playing basketball and other distractions made it rather mundane. With a group of friends he danced on Sundays at the Metropolitano hotel, while standing out as a good student, and Father Francisco Miranda formed his faith with sound advice. Upon graduating from high school, being the first of his class, he had to read the farewell speech to the Virgin Dolorosa in an emotional ceremony.

In 1944 he enrolled in Law; with other colleagues they met to study in the apartment of his friend Santiago Castillo Barredo in the building of The Telegraph, where one day Dr. Abel Romeo Castillo commented: “What a thing! All these young conservatives and even Marians are grandchildren of illustrious liberal Freemasons ”. At that time he defended Catholic principles in the Philosophy of Law classes of Dr. José Vicente Trujillo, who when listening to him smiled paternally.

On the 47th he presented himself to the Quinto Guayas battalion to fight against the dictatorship of Colonel Carlos Mancheno. On the 52nd, he was appointed private secretary of Foreign Minister Alvarado Garaycoa, participating in the tour he made to Chile, Argentina and Brazil. A grant to Madrid from the Institute of Hispanic Culture, he had to pass a little chapel every day to go to the dining room. “I went in to pray one day and suddenly I felt the unequivocal call of the Lord.”

Upon his return, in ’54 he had a period of continuous parties every weekend and fell in love with Elsie Monge Yoder, recently graduated from an American school run by the Mary Knoll nuns. “We loved each other intensely, but at a certain point we both agreed to dedicate our lives to the service of others. Both in her and in me it was an aspiration that had been maturing ”.

Father Beauger advised him to be patient, until he finally told him the convenience of notifying your relatives. But when to do it? The occasion came after the doctoral degree ceremony and at the toast at his home, when only his intimates were there and he expressed his decision to enter the seminary. His good aunts Rosita and María Izquierdo hugged him in tears, although later they ended up joking about the scene, while his brothers, who were speechless, brought Father Beauger up, waiting nervously on the ground floor, because in Guayaquil vocations generate negative reactions and even violent.

“In October I entered the Major Seminary of Quito. My relatives said that it would be more understandable to them if I became a Jesuit ”. On October 24, 59, after successful studies in Chile, at thirty-four years of age he was ordained at the Colegio Pío Latinoamericano in Rome and wore the always white cassock, which he would abandon in the 1970s for a modest shirt and trousers. to be equal to the poorest.

The 65 had finished its work on Vatican Council II, that he made so many changes in favor of the Church, and the pope ordered the dissemination of his provisions. In each country a commission was formed and in Quito the Latin American Pastoral Institute was inaugurated to make the masses aware of this reality.

In 68 he was sent to set up a parish with the former community members of the savannah, whom he transferred to the railway citadel since it had been the starting point for the railway to the coast since 1922, which no longer existed. The place was rough, sad, abandoned and almost lonely, half jungle. Next to it was a large firing range. Later a municipal garbage dump was inaugurated with its terrible smells. Soon his masses became famous; He used to speak in many cases solemn, sometimes humorous, always profound and unexpected because of the novelty of a Gospel that with the sounds of yesterday became a living word today.

The bishop of Riobamba requested him as auxiliary bishop, but Archbishop Echeverría of Guayaquil objected, considering him dangerous. And so the years went by, in total humility of service to the poorest of his parish.

He had a widely read Sunday column in THE UNIVERSE; However, the new Archbishop Larrea, his distant relative by Borja (on his mother’s side), made him a condition that each article should be previously subjected to his strict censorship, which was not accepted, as is logical and natural.

In 1997, in front of several demonstrations by worshipers of an image of the Divine Child from Colombia, he clarified that “the Divine Child does not exist,” that every time two or more people meet in the name of Jesus, he is present. He had also opposed the religious visions and messages that the Cuenca girl Pachi Talbot received from the Virgin, no less than in old Spanish, on Saturdays, in the garden of Cajas.

I lived modestly in an alien village that I got to know: everything was neat, but no frills, there was only a fan blade and some furniture. Nothing was his own, and he only had a monthly retirement of thirty dollars. “It had been slowly fading for years. Not seeing was his great suffering, for him, who read so much. He was concerned about the work he could give to others, that they had to take care of him and help him. He struggled, he wanted to get better, he was anguished, then all that was put in order, he lived each day deeply, sometimes a tear ran down his face, but he was still possessed of a deep tranquility. His face was becoming more luminous, he radiated peace, many people passed through his room to ask for his blessing ”.

A cluster of diseases weakened him, he lost almost all his faculties, but he could hear the loving words of those who cared for him. Never a complaint, just a thank you. And his natural silence became almost permanent.

He died at two in the afternoon on August 10, 2006, aged eighty-one, due to respiratory arrest, and without ceasing to offer tokens of love to others. Those who did not know him gave him a reputation as a communist in life, but the people consider him a saint and hope that he is the first Guayaquil man to go up to the altars.

In my eighty-odd years of life, and having treated many compatriots in depth, I have only met two characters that I could well qualify as saints: Monsignor César Antonio Mosquera Corral, whose kind personality, the tone of his voice and the delicacy of his manners, provoked a state of peace and calm, a kind of blissful tranquility; and Father Pepe Gómez, who, with his seriousness and silences, moved those around him, because he had something that escaped all rational understanding and that naturally induced states of deep, intense religiosity; His closeness was enough, nothing more, it did not require words. He was a kind of holy man, and so he qualified it Glance in a famous article published while he was alive.

* National Prize of Culture Eugenio Espejo in the specialty of Literary Activities (2005).