Amigó’s school has its roots in the Gospel of Jesus, the Good News, which came preferentially to the last of the line, the excluded, those placed on the side of the road, or as Jesus himself expresses it: «As you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it to me…» (cf. Mt 25:31-46).
It would be daring to affirm the originality of a proposal that began to be built at the end of the 19th century, without taking into account what had happened in the previous 19 centuries, and that was made in different persons, currents and events of history. A School that was born among consecrated people, it is necessary to admit it, whose baggage is Christian spirituality, because it is born from it, and conceived in the discipline of asceticism that regulates, shapes, corrects and moderates, to make way towards the perfection of mysticism, as the dream of happiness as God’s will for men and women, especially for the little ones of the world, conceived in our time as violated, excluded, victims, whose rights and even their voice have been taken away.
The dream of the Amigonian School, takes shape in the life of a privileged man of history, who after living in the bosom of his family the maternal pain, together with the economic anguish of the father, in the human Christian dimension that he drank in his first home, and then in the Franciscan School of the Capuchin friars, he knew how to take flight to listen to God in his vital project and in the project that, conceived in his heart, involved consecrated men and women, who would carry out the evangelical proposal, contained in the testamentary amigonian mandate: «…You, my beloved sons and daughters, whom He has constituted as the shepherds of His flock, you are the ones who are to go after the stray sheep, until you return it to the fold of the Good Shepherd…» (OCLA 1831).
When Luis Amigó, moved by the Spirit, founded his two congregations of Capuchin Tertiary Brothers and Sisters, a dream that his young heart harbored (Cfr. Autobiography 8-9) while living in his home and in society, and feeling the needs; (Cfr. Autobiography 6-7) it was the Lord Himself who led him, so that, in the charismatic mission that he left to them, he let the compassionate feelings experienced in his family shine through: «dedicating himself with all solicitude and devotion to the relief of the spiritual and corporal needs of his neighbors…» (Cfr. OCLA 2293) and «to be more disposed to serve them in the ministries to which this congregation is especially consecrated, such as: the instruction of adults and infants in the arts and sciences; the service of the sick, especially at home, and the administration and direction of prisons and jails» (Cfr. OCLA 2361).
The Amigonian School could have as its beginning the year 1885, when Father Luis Amigó, in the midst of the cholera epidemic, says in his Autobiography: «In such an afflictive situation, and considering how much the ever-growing progress of the Third Order, recently increased with the foundation of the Congregation of Capuchin Tertiary Sisters, should please the Lord, I offered to the Lord, to appease his justice and that the cholera epidemic would cease, to redouble my efforts and work to expand more and more the Venerable Third Order of Penance; And at that moment, the idea crossed my mind and was fixed in my mind (I do not know if by divine inspiration) to complete the work with the foundation of a Congregation of Capuchin Tertiary Religious, who would dedicate themselves to the penitents and to the care and moralization of the prisoners» (Cfr. OCLA 83).
«Recently founded the Congregation of Tertiaries, the Bishop of Madrid asked the Father Founder to put his religious in charge of the direction of the Santa Rita School of Reform, in Madrid, Spain, which they took possession of at the end of October 1890… This house has always been the most important foundation of the Congregation» (Cfr. OCLA 133).
Santa Rita, a school for the wayward of that time, some inexperienced religious but with a heart full of dreams tempered by the conventual discipline, are a privileged place for the birth of the Amigonian School, with an educational and pedagogical project where the names of the groups and the activities carried out with the children, felt the hand and the dream of the beloved Founder and his first religious, among them, special merit to Blessed Domingo María de Alboraya, martyr of the Spanish Civil War of 1936.
The School of apprenticeship-error, had a place in the capacity of dedication of the religious, seasoned with their pedagogical inexperience, a mixture of abandonment in the hands of God and the exercise of the iron discipline required to become new men, in response to the call of the God who throbbed in them. Slowly, with the assurance of trust in God, the educational exercise of good will, personal improvement, credibility in being and acting, which is of God, an initial methodology was born – a path – that of the Amigonian School, built on the initial foundations of asceticism and Christian mysticism that today, as described by the expert pen of Fr. Juan Antonio Vives, could be defined as the pedagogical feeling, which confers a seal of identity to the Amigonian action and which revolves around these essential values:
– «To believe blindly in the natural goodness of every person, and consequently, to hope against all hope.
– The horizon of personal fulfillment is happiness linked to freedom.
– To know the person through the heart and to educate from the affectionate closeness and cordial dedication.
– To love each person in his or her individuality, and to show compassion to the underprivileged, according to the mercy of the Gospel.
– To create in the educational groups a family atmosphere, where the educator plays the role of father/mother and elder brother.
– To be strong in order to remain faithful in the determination to be an educator.
– To be vitally consistent with what is transmitted, thus acquiring credibility» (Cfr. Historia de la Pedagogía Amigoniana, Juan Antonio Vives, p. XXXIII).
Fray Marino Martínez Pérez, Tc
