The story that you are about to hear is, or has been in one way or another,
his own story.
It is the story of every human being, religious or not, to have even tried to
worship God and Christ without knowing them.
Some in ignorance, and others with their consciousness, scientific, religious,
and traditionally characterized.
Some based on the modus vivendis, and others on an inexplicable piety and
devotion, many times, to the same human reason.
This was the case of a Cornelius, Paul, Augustine, Teresa of Jesus,
Luis de Leon, Casidoro de Reina, Cipriano de Varela, Savonarola,
Jules Wycliffe, Martín Lutero, and an endless number of men and women who
preferred to obey God and Christ rather than the Pope and his Roman court.
This is the case of our brother and reverend Dr. Alberto Magno Rivera,
Bishop of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Spain.
With you, the servant of Christ and priest of God.
Said the great Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, I am I plus my circumstances.
And it is precisely the circumstances that surrounded my life and the circumstances
that made me, at the age of seven, take the incognito determination that I
had to take, that caused in me the constant agony of becoming a priest.
It was these circumstances, seen from the point of view of my own mother and her own
experiences, that propelled her, in my own ignorance of what this meant,
to choose me among all her children, so that this desire would be fulfilled to
become a priest.
And it is the circumstances that propel, at all times and at all moments,
that many mothers, fathers, families, all over this known land, direct their
impulses and good intentions to lead their children and their daughters to become
priests, monks and nuns.
It is also the circumstances that propel these and these, at a certain mature age,
to choose the path of the priesthood or the cloister.
These may be of different natures, but whatever the nature of these
circumstances, they are always the ones that imprint in the character and in the
conscience of the person what must be in the future.
The circumstances that I was surrounded, especially, in an implicitly Roman
Catholic home, a home that, necessarily under the pious devotion to the Virgin and
to the saints, was primarily due to the Church, is the devotion that fed,
in the midst of my circumstances, the desire to be consecrated to the
priesthood, even at that early age, through my own intentions and impulses,
by dedicating myself to play, not with the toys that children normally play at that
age, but already using religious instruments to practice, in the form of a
game, the religious practice of the Mass.
Due to these circumstances, my mother, impressed by this, begins to notice,
to see and to understand that, in some way, God called me to the ministry
of the priesthood.
Isn't this the same circumstance that leads to priests and nuns, to be priests
and nuns?
No.
There are other reasons, there are other reasons that drive people to become
priests and nuns.
But if, among all the reasons and motives, there is not one that implies the idea,
the genuine idea, and the genuine experience of serving God and Christ,
this, sooner or later, this intention will be confronted, and confronted for a bad
result, for a fatal end.
But if, in these circumstances, the desire to serve God and Christ,
devotedly and faithfully, is implied, sooner or later, the light itself,
from Christ and from God, to whom, in our ignorance, we are disposed to
serve, will shine, as it shone in my own life, in my own path.
Sooner or later, these circumstances will be changed, and these circumstances will
come to be the genuine circumstances that, in ignorance, came to be my own.
The circumstances that drive me to enter a seminary at the age of seven.
The doors of the seminary opened for me like the same doors of glory and heaven.
At that moment, my own experience, which I could not understand because of my
young age, told me from that moment that they also closed, they closed at the
moment they opened so as not to give more space to the world, to the darkness,
but as I had been taught, to the light, to the light that can only be received
from the Holy Mother Church.
In this way, the world was already beginning to be unknown to me,
to enter a new world, an unknown world, but a world of hope, which was already
sheltered in my short age, in my short experience, and in my short emotion.
The world of glory, the world of holiness, the world of justice, the world of
forgiveness, the world of fear of God, the world of respect for the human being.
In this way, I want to say that with the same innocence, with the same temperance,
with the same holy ignorance that now accompanied my age, I make this statement,
I make this confession, not only of why I became a priest, but also of why I stopped
being a priest at the service of Rome, to become a priest at the service of
Christ and of God.
In this way, as I continue in the story of my experiences, I wish to be clear and
clear that it is not my intention, in any way, nor do I intend to defame in
any way the institution to which I served with all the most healthy intention of my
heart and soul, in my own ignorance.
And I do not accuse anyone, on the contrary, I accuse myself a thousand times
of not having obeyed God before man.
Many years before, of having done it years later.
However, the circumstances tried to enslave me of that which I served.
The circumstances tried to enslave my conscience of that which my soul
confronted with the word of God when it was already read of me.
That is why, I repeat, I do not accuse anyone.
Instead, I accuse myself of remembering these things, an accusation of which I can
already be sure that God has forgiven me in Christ.
And this guilt is no longer felt in me.
On the contrary, Christ has taken it along with my sins.
In this way, I want to point out that in this moment, being already in the
seminary, on an occasion, after a year and a half of not seeing my mother,
I was called by the rector of the seminary.
And when I was called, in this interview, I could notice that there was something
different to the usual, to the normal of all the interviews there have been with
the rector.
It is on this occasion, it was said to me, that I was allowed to leave the seminary
due to an emergency.
My head was debating and my thoughts were getting confused, not understanding what
was happening.
But at that moment, my aunt and some other family members came in, and I could
realize that it was something related to my family.
The rector informed me that I would be away from the seminary for four hours,
and that my own aunt would bring me back.
Already under this impression, I could ask my aunt what was happening.
And she, with tears in her eyes, told me, Your mother is very sick.
She wants to see you.
So we got ready, arriving at the house, and entering the house immediately.
I could feel, not only the influence of that aspect of death that began to
surround the corridors, the rooms, and all those walls that one day were so
dear to me.
All that place, the furniture, the floors, everything seemed to smell of
death.
But next to this impression, what impressed me the most in the face of
everything, even before seeing my own mother on her bed of agony, of death,
was the prayer that so deeply went there with my own consciousness.
And in a state of supreme despair and anguish, prayers still caused this
impression with more power in my soul, in my spirit.
And I could notice that instead of being a consolation to my soul, this same devotion
and this same mercy with which all those women of Athens prayed for my mother's
soul, they told me that rather than seeing her alive, it seemed that they were
rushing the cup of her death.
I felt so confused that I could not understand that all this could help my own
faith, but on the contrary, my own faith was fading.
I did not know what I was doing, if I had faith.
As I approached the bed, my mother took my hand, and already losing her sight,
she tightly squeezed my hand in her hand and said to me, My son, my priest!
She was screaming at that moment, My God, what is happening to my mother?
My mother replied, Oh my son, help me, help me, because I am horrified by what I
see.
I am horrified by what I feel.
I feel surrounded by death, doubts, confusion.
I see strange specters around the headboard of my bed.
Oh my God, Holy Virgin, let someone help me.
At that moment I looked at the priest, and when I looked at him, and I can
remember him until that moment, he replied, I have given the sacraments to
your mother.
I have done everything I could.
I can not do anything else.
I could feel that the agony of my own mother was my own agony, and the death of
my own mother was my own death, because without knowing what to do,
when I heard from the priest that I had already done everything, and my mother was
dying in greater agony, and in greater confusion, death was taking her,
I could question in my own mind, in secret, and before God, and before
heaven, what then has been the benefit of all the sacraments known and to have,
of all the blessings and indulgences imparted, of all the prayers that were
made until that moment, what was the benefit of so much mercy, of so much
devotion, if my mother was dying in fear, in anguish and in confusion.
The time passed, and already the traces of this experience lived in the face of the
death of my mother, brought as a consequence new experiences, and these
experiences that raised not only one doubt, but many, one after another.
Doubts that could not even be referred to my own confessor.
Doubts that I had to carry with me in my subconscious, to the point of trying to
put out the guilt that I felt by the very fact of not confessing these doubts,
of constantly submitting my body to sacrifices and immense tortures,
to sleep for months and months on four chairs, with nothing to cover me except my
own skin and my own flesh.
On winter nights, I can remember how it was taken, after three months,
to be hospitalized in a hospital with a cavern in my left lung.
As a consequence of these constant sufferings, as a consequence of this
constant agony, which was no longer a physical agony, but was already an agony
that became a spiritual agony, an agony through which I could constantly
cry out, constantly, My God, have mercy on me.
My God, have mercy on me.
And I believed myself more and more, instead of being more just, more holy,
more perfect, I believed myself more and more unjust, more sinful, and with less
hope of being able to find near God, no consolation, no forgiveness.
This constantly brought to my consciousness the need for greater
sacrifice, with the aim of extinguishing this guilt, and with the aim of responding
to the good intentions that still sheltered my mind, sooner or later,
to come to fulfill the desire of my mother, a desire that had already ceased
to be of my mother to become mine, to become a priest, as it were.
Priest, this word was constantly repeated to me.
Oh my God, let me see that day when I can become a priest.
And in the word and in the term I seemed to see the solution of all my problems,
of all my agony, of all my doubts, of all my concerns.
But time passed until on one occasion something strange took place.
Already at about 18 years of age, I was called on the days of visit,
and especially on Saturday, and I was told that there was my family and a friend who
visited me.
At that moment, when I was addressing my family, this friend took me by the arm and
said, Alberto, I need to speak to you immediately.
I have something to say, I wish to give it to you, but it has to be in secret,
because what I have to bring is not allowed to be given to you in public.
I said, look, I have so little time to see my family, I can only see her once,
and you are going to take this away from me, you are going to steal this time from
me.
Don't you think it is unfair?
He said, it is unfair that you don't give me this time.
And I noticed how his tears ran down his eyes.
I realized that there was something very serious to reject.
Finally, I said, let's go to the garden, and near the back of the garden,
I said, give me whatever you have to give me.
He said, no, let's get to the end, to hide behind some trees, and then I will
grant you what I have come to bring you.
We arrived, and taking something out of his pocket, he put it in my pocket,
and immediately he said, you don't need to take it out.
But I couldn't resist the idea, the temptation to take it out,
and when I took it out of my pocket, I saw a little book in my hands.
The title of the book was on the cover, The New Testament of Our Lord Jesus
Christ.
Immediately I said, well, why have you brought this to me?
He said, you are studying to be a priest.
I have read this book, and I believe that only you can have it, and you must have
it.
I have seen with what fervor you have consecrated yourself to be a priest,
and I would like to do it, but I cannot.
However, the things that are written in this book, if I were to do them,
he says, I would give my life for them.
I say, how do you explain yourself in such a way that you can give your life for some
things that are written in a simple book like this?
He says, this is something more than a simple book.
I have found things here in this book that I have never been able to receive through
all my years of religion.
I have found things that have brought me the need to bring them to you.
Because I have known of your constant sacrifices, I have known of your tortures,
I have known of your agonies, and I am sure that if you read this book,
you can have some benefit.
When he spoke to me, I was turning the pages of the book, and I was looking for
whether the book was authorized by the Church, if the book had the imprint of the
Church on it, but I realized that it did not.
And then, desperately looking between one side and the other of the pages,
I said to him, you have compromised me, you have made me sin, and you have made me
sin gravely.
You have brought me a book that speaks of Jesus Christ, that speaks of God,
and is not even authorized by the Church.
This New Testament is not a New Testament.
Wait a moment, this is a communist book.
Therefore, you have made me sin gravely.
You are evil.
You must take the book right now.
Wait a moment, do not take it.
Leave it with me, because I am going to burn it.
I am going to burn it immediately.
But you, from this moment, go to the confessor, look for a confessor,
and confess such grave sin.
When I took the book in my hands, I went to the incinerator, which was
there, near where we were talking.
And when I got to the incinerator, I tried to throw it between the flames of
the incinerator, and the book did not want to come off my hands.
It seemed that my hands and my fingers were clasped in such a way that it could
not come off.
And one, and two, and three times I tried, the book did not come off my hands.
And already, when I approached the incinerator, even the flames of the
incinerator seemed to want to devour me, when I tried to melt it between them.
But when I moved away from the incinerator, in an act of anger,
I threw it.
And when I threw it, it fell out of the incinerator.
It fell to the ground.
And something told me to pick it up.
I went and picked it up.
That something could not be anything other than the providence of God.
At that moment, the Holy Spirit, for me known as the Providence of God,
the Holy Spirit, who began to reverberate my consciousness, the Holy Spirit who
began to bring light, and who right there, bringing light, brought me the knowledge
of the same revelation of God, written.
The Word of God had come to my hands.
But not only had it come to my hands, the Word of God had come, from that
moment, to my consciousness.
And through the days, the months, the years, in which I devoured it,
and secretly read it, under the blankets, the blankets of my bed, in secret,
with a flashlight, during the nights, for more than three years, the Word of God
began to come to my subconscious, and to cross my soul, my spirit,
my body, and to begin to confront everything that was doctrine and teaching
of man.
I could hear the voice of Christ, which was constantly being said to me,
and was repeated, in the hours of silence and devotion, they were repeated to me,
one after another, within my own consciousness.
You are wrong.
You are wrong because you do not know the Scriptures and the power of God.
That is what Christ said to the religious of his time.
And now I could feel that same living Christ, that same Christ that I could
already see, through the pages of that revelation of the New Testament,
that was a living Christ, I could already feel it, speaking to my own soul.
Say, Alberto, Alberto, you are wrong, you are wrong, and the cause of your error
is that you do not know the Scriptures and the power of God.
Scrooge the Scriptures, Alberto, Scrooge the Scriptures, hear the same
voice, because they, only the Scriptures, are the ones that give testimony of me.
And these words of Christ, one after another, not only did they accompany me in
the moments of silence and devotion, and in the moments of my own
consciousness, but they already began to be heard in the corridors of the seminary
and in the corridors of the cathedral where we went to Mass.
These words constantly accompanied me in the streets, in the classes, all the time
and all the hour.
You are wrong, you are wrong, you are wrong.
You are wrong, Alberto, you are wrong.
You are continually making mistakes.
When you fast, when you submit your body to continuous sacrifice, even the very
death of your body, you are making mistakes.
When you submit your consciousness to the traditional teaching of man and do not
submit it to obedience to the word of God, you are making mistakes, making mistakes
continuously.
In this confrontation, I had no choice but to begin to expose, to expose what I
lived, to expose what I felt, to expose what for more than three years had already
begun to take place in secret within me.
And I began to expose it to students, and I began to expose it to my teachers,
and I began to expose it to my confessors.
And between one and the other, all I could hear was constantly this
sentence.
Alberto, remember that you are fighting in vain.
You fight in vain because the Church is great and strong, and it is the Church.
And remember that it is so great that you, before the Church, are like a stone in the
middle of the current of an impetuous river.
And you are working against the current, against the current of centuries of
tradition, against the current of centuries of oral revelation, of councils
and of Popes.
You are fighting in vain.
And once again, I could remember during the nights when I meditated on this word,
as a consolation, those accusations and sentences that were made to me.
You have no right to think about anything.
Alberto, you have no right to think about anything, I was told.
That the Fathers of the Church never thought, because the mere fact that your
thoughts have doubts, they are telling you that you are not faithful to the Church,
that you are not faithful to the Holy Mother Church, not even to the Pope,
and for that reason neither to Christ, because the Pope is the vicar of Christ on
earth.
And you cannot be faithful to Christ without being faithful to the Pope and to
the Church.
Our Mother Church never makes mistakes.
Our Mother Church is always correct.
You may be found in error, but the Church is always correct.
Even more, remember and never forget, until the end of your life, that outside
the Church there is no salvation.
And the day of my ordination came, and it came in an era, in an era when Pope
John XXIII himself already declared the intentions of the Church and of the
Fathers to open the door to the whole world and to Christianity, to life in the
whole world, to a new council, to the Second Vatican Council.
And together with my ordination, not only did the hope of having fulfilled
all my dreams and the prayers and prayers of my mother come, but together with it I
saw the hope to achieve through this council, perhaps, what the years of life
and struggle had sheltered in my consciousness and in my subconscious,
what the years of struggle and desire of seeing the Church reformed, of seeing the
Church adjusted, but more than anything, of seeing my own life adjusted to the
mandates of Christ and of God, not according to councils and to Popes,
not according to traditions, but according to the very words of Christ in the Holy
Scriptures, according to the same liturgy and theology of that primitive Church that
is described in the book of Acts, they tell us that in this way they
received the word being baptized and were added that day of Pentecost as three
thousand people and persevered in the doctrine of the apostles, in communion
with each other, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers.
And in this way, he says, they sold their properties, they had all things in common
and persevered unanimously every day in the temple, breaking the bread in the
houses, they ate together with joy and simplicity of heart.
Praising God and having favor with all the people, the Lord added every day to the
Church those who had to be saved.
And in the face of this authoritative and unique description of the Church of Christ
and of what this Church was in the first Christian century, my soul eagerly awaited
that this Council could bring to the world the reality of what Christ was and what
the Church of Christ was in the first Christian century.
This was what led me to continue my career.
This was what led me to strive to obtain what my mother could have wished with all
her life and her death, to become a priest.
This was what propelled me in the face of the confrontation that I suffered between
the mandates of God and the mandates of man.
This was what also led me to finally know Christ.
This was what, after having been ordained, led me, together with a group of priests,
to put and demand before our bishops that the fulfillment of these words be carried
out, together with the new decrees of the Council, that not only everything become a
theory, but that everything become a reality, that the whole Church,
that the institution that at this time was called Church, and that for me was no
longer the Church of Christ, to be convinced in what the book of Revelations
said, in the ramera, the mother of the fornications of the earth, and the mother
of the rameras, that at this time, this apostate came to believe in Christ,
as I felt that I needed to come to be.
My pretensions, like the Jews before Christ, described in the chapter 8 of St.
John, and verse 31, my pretensions were the same.
I could claim before Christ and altercate with my own Savior, that I was already a
priest, that I had prayed, that I had fasted, that I had submitted to my body
fasts and sacrifices, and all kinds of penance, that I had received so many and
so many indulgences, that with all the inheritance that I had received,
that with all the practice, and with the faith with which I believed, the obedience
to all the mandates of the Church, and to all the mandates of God,
that I could claim that it was something, however, like the Pharisees before Christ,
they did not receive in response to anything other than the words of the same
Master.
You, if you remain in my word, you will be truly my disciples,
and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.
Oh yes, if I choose you to be free, you will be truly free.
And since Christ himself already responded to my claims, that there was nothing but
to put my faith in him, and thus to confess to him, I could not, at least,
demand the same of my superiors.
And in this demand, in response, I suffered to be submitted and confined to
a psychiatric hospital, and from this moment I had to cross the thresholds of
the psychiatric center to which I had been confined.
When, already interviewed by the director of the Semer, I communicated that,
by orders of the Church and my archbishop, they were going to help me in order to
make me return to mental and emotional normality, I could understand that,
in the midst of these circumstances, my salvation was beginning to come closer
than ever.
It was a paradox, and I could understand it, and I could not understand it.
At the same time, it seemed that the doors of that psychiatric center had not only
opened like those of the seminary in my childhood, but that they were also
closing, and at this time they were closing behind me, to life, to the hope of
being able to leave this place, and even to the hope of being able to
communicate with anyone.
But I no longer felt the need to communicate with anyone.
Now I felt like never before the need to communicate with God, and in an act of
determination, in an act in which I could now feel within me that call of God from
so many years ago, I could continue to walk in the strength, in the energy of
that hope, to see Him face to face, as I could see Him through the pages of
the Gospels.
So I went to the room to which I had already been confined.
Until when?
I did not know.
Three months later, that hope that was in me had already physically and morally
disappeared, because finding myself inert, completely inert, in the bed that was my
bed, and was already the bed of my death, and not only of my illness, I began to
feel that life had gone, and that the same skin was sticking to my bones,
unable to speak, unable to hear, unable to even see, because my physical
vision had gone, unable to even eat, because it was already feeding me
intravenously through my veins.
Thus, in this way, I felt within my own consciousness, when I could no longer feel
it outside of myself, the words of Christ.
If you remain in my words, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the
truth, and the truth will set you free, will set you free, will set you free.
You will be free, Alberto, Alberto, you will be free knowing me.
Oh, I cried out at that time, in response to this call, my God, my God, if it is
true that you are here, if it is true that you are here, oh God, lift me up,
save me, have mercy on me, have mercy on me, oh God, and forgive my sins,
forgive my offenses and my rebellions, oh Christ.
At this time, my prayer was no longer made to wait, and feeling the life,
and the same life of God flowing through my veins, of my blood, of my body,
of my soul and spirit, there I rose, incorporating myself through the power of
God, and I could already notice that the same glory of God surrounded, flooded,
even the physical darkness dissipated in that room, in that room, and not only
outside, but inside me, the same light of God, the same glory of God began to give
me signs of my salvation in Christ.
Let us pray with this prayer.
Lord Jesus, if this is my hour of tribulation, I believe that you give me
security, and if this is my hour of struggle and war, I believe in your peace,
and if this is my hour of doubt, help my uncredulity, O Christ,
and if this is my hour of hatred and violence, I believe that right now,
Jesus, you grant me love and tranquility.
But above all, above all, O Christ, if this is the hour in which after so much
struggling, after so much searching, and after so much confusion, I feel in
you, O Jesus, the need, come to me, O Christ, come to me in this moment,
and right now, make your dwelling in my heart.