Today, 17 October, marks the 28th death anniversary of Richard “Richie” Fernando SJ, the Filipino scholastic who died from a grenade blast in Cambodia. He was only 26 when he gave up his life completely for others.
I am 26 years old now and have been sent to Vietnam for Regency. I draw profound inspiration from Richie’s example as a Jesuit regent and seek his intercession as I give myself every day to the mission entrusted to me. My role is mainly to accompany the Vietnamese prenovices and candidates in their English learning and human formation.
I know Richie only vicariously. I first heard about him when I was a university freshman attending a discernment seminar. He was a subject of vocation promotion materials, and I remember seeing a stampita with his photo and the words, “I know where my heart is.”
In the candidacy house in the Philippines, there is a photo of Richie on the corridor wall with arms wide open and hands gesturing upward, perhaps to remind those discerning to become Jesuits of the openness necessary in following Jesus.
When I was a novice, I quoted Richie for a Mass sharing I delivered in the apostolate. It was from one of his well-known diary entries: “I wish that when I die, people would remember not how great, powerful, or talented I was, but that I served and spoke for the truth, I gave witness to what is right, I was sincere with all my words and actions. In other words, I loved and followed Christ.”
That was on the Sunday before the Solemnity of Christ the King. I wanted to make a point on the two standards by which a person’s life is measured: one of the world and the other of Christ. Richie understood Christ’s standard well and embraced the sacrifice that came with it. He knew where his heart was. He said it himself, “It is with Jesus Christ.”
When I moved to Loyola House of Studies for my Juniorate and Philosophy, I felt excited whenever Filipino Jesuit missionaries came and stayed with the community. I looked forward to sitting with them at meals, listening to their stories about life in the mission. Something in their stories lingered with me, and now that I am a missionary myself, it dawned on me that that “something” is, in fact, Someone.
Richie arrived in Cambodia in 1995 to work at a school for the handicapped. Not a year had passed when he wrote to his friend and then fellow scholastic, Fr Totet Banaynal SJ, about how he found himself “feeling great love” for the people, especially the students at the centre. He said, “If only I could follow Christ’s ways. If only I could help all of them as God would… I hope I could offer my life to them to the fullest.” The Spirit in Richie was groaning to flow out as self-effacing and self-giving love. Flow out indeed the Spirit did.
I arrived in Vietnam in mid-June. At the end of August, I went to Cambodia to renew my visa for another three months. Much thanks to Fr Damo Chour SJ and Fr Mark Lopez SJ, I visited all the Jesuit communities and ministries in the Cambodian Mission. I even stayed in the very same room Richie had once occupied. Although the old site of the vocational school for the handicapped is gone, Richie’s room has been relocated to another plot of land and restored just as it was almost three decades ago.
I never met Richie in person, but seeing the present situation of the Jesuit mission in Cambodia gifted me with a glimpse of the same mission for which Richie gave his life. It was a felt sense of the one and the same Spirit of the mission. The same Spirit whose encouragement, I believe, moved Richie to protect the lives of his beloved Cambodian students.
Staying in his room granted me an interior sense of Richie’s sacred space, where he dwelled as Jesus’s beloved companion. There, I experienced what Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins so beautifully expressed in verse: “the dearest freshness deep down things”. In fact, while in Richie’s room, as I was preparing a recording for the Vietnamese prenovices and candidates at the beginning of their discernment year, the Spirit inspired me to speak of Richie’s life and mission, his love for Christ and the poor, and his offering of self—an act so dear, ever fresh, always deep.
I proceed in my present mission trusting in the one and the same Spirit whom Richie trusted, who trusted Richie and now trusts me, while also praying for Richie’s intercession in my own striving to dwell where God’s heart is.
Rogelio R Nato Jr SJ is a Filipino Regent assigned to the Jesuit prenovitiate in Vietnam.
Related story: Beginning the beatification cause of Richie Fernando SJ