In Pace Christi

Fr. Mario Menghini was born on September 12, 1924 in Fabriano, Italy, and was ordained on June 6, 1948 – the year of the arrival of the Comboni Missionaries in Mexico. Three years later he joined those first “titans” who opened the doors of the Institute to Mexican vocations.

When he first arrived, he was assigned to La Purísima, from where he was visiting the emerging ‘colonia’ María Auxiliadora in the valley of Santo Domingo, and all the neighboring villages.

In 1962 he was entrusted with the care of the church of Santa Bárbara and Santa Rosalía, where he had the company of Fr. Alfonso Segato. The following year he started and completed a house for elderly men and women in Santa Rosalía.

From 1988 to 2000, Fr. Mario was in Guerrero Negro, where he carried out a very important restructure work given to him by Bishop Berlie Belaunzarán. In those years, in fact, he went through a period of exclaustration and for six years he worked at the service of the diocese of La Paz. He was the great restorer of the Jesuit Missions of Santa Gertrudis and San Francisco Borja in the State of Baja California. To this end, he founded the Mejibó group, made up of committed lay people, in Ensenada. These people helped him in the restoration of those isolated missions in the most inhospitable part of the desert of the central area of Baja California.

After a short stay in the NAP – less than two years – he returned as a member of the Mexican province in 2002 and there he remained up to his death at the age of 90, more than 50 of those years dedicated to the Mexican Church.

Gifted with great acumen and insight, Fr. Mario put these talents at the service of mission and of the local Church. He knew how to establish potentially useful contacts. In his abundant correspondence there are letters to provincials and superior generals, bishops and government authorities including the Italian ambassador to Mexico.

Fr. Mario belonged to that generation of Italian Comboni missionaries who saw the Mexican province grow and witnessed – not without some perplexity – to its “Mexicanization.” It was not easy to entrust and pass the baton to young Mexican Comboni missionaries whom he himself and many other Comboni missionaries of Baja California had seen grow and had formed!

This Comboni Missionary, so human and so passionate, is remembered in many internet pages and web sites by people of Baja California: politicians and intellectuals, but also simple people, fishermen, seniors and members of the Cursillo, of which Fr. Mario was the pioneer in Santa Rosalía, who all mourn over his death.
(P. Rafael González Ponce, mccj).
Da Mccj Bulletin n. 258 suppl. In Memoriam, gennaio 2014, pp. 97-103.