THE FATEFUL ENCOUNTER

    While he is engaged in this endeavor that demands great responsibility, there will occur the decisive and supreme encounter that will completely change the life of the young director of the Agricultural Colony which had been founded in the rain forest to evangelize and civilize the Indios. One day, a young boy comes running to the Mission imploring the friars to give the last rites to his dying father, some 25 miles away. It is pouring, yet Frei Daniel rides off on horseback. The dying man seems to revive after receiving the last rites.
    Frei Daniel is about to return to the Mission when another boy approaches him with the news that a very ill woman, not far away, is asking for his religious assistance. The missionary follows him and quickly reaches the hut. He enters and what he sees can only be imagined. The woman wants to confess, wants to receive Holy Communion, wants to die in the peace of God, and Frei Daniel absolves her, comforts her and gives her some nursing assistance.
    All his biographers, from Frei Ezechia from Iseo, to the more authoritative Frei Metodio from Nembro, relate this episode, and we must believe it, although there is no mention of it in the Diary. The woman was in the last stages of leprosy, a condition that is horrible to behold. Young, generous and brave, with a faith that could move mountains, Frei Daniel is not worried at all, but he becomes infected with Hansen's bacillus, which at that time was known as leprosy. It is not known and nobody will ever know if that was when he actually contracted the disease.

   Why was it not prevented by Divine Providence? Frei Camillo Micheli from Borno, who is today the oldest member of the Mission, used to have the letter in which Frei Daniel wrote about the development of his illness, but at that time, as a young missionary, he had paid no attention to it. Now, after so many years, he hardly remembers anything, which is a pity. At one point Frei Daniel seems to start worrying, and in 1909, he writes the diagnosis of his strange malaise. We read this in his Diary. Those long, painful years from 1909 until 1924, the year of his death, seem like an eternity to us. Yet, Frei Daniel keeps praising and thanking God, the good Father, for this illness which he calls a blessing. This is another sign of the most Holy Providence of a Divine Father who only wants our well being. Earth-shaking miracles and extraordinary happenings that transcend our logic are reported, and here we are talking about them more than 70 years later.
Church of mud. Colonia do Prata
    Would we have been able to talk, we ask ourselves, without those fateful meetings in the forest when Frei Daniel attended the sick man and the ailing woman? We also wonder if all the poor who have chosen to invoke Frei Daniel from among the thousands of religious figures and saints and who continue to invoke him because they believe him a Saint, would do the same. We stand in awe and pray.