Friar Jenaro, the canonist who investigated and disseminated the origins of the Recollection

“I was born into a holy family.” This is how Friar Jenaro Fernández described his family, a way of acknowledging the influence of his parents and siblings on his character, his vocation, and his way of being and doing. He was born on January 19, 1909 in Dicastillo (Navarre, Spain), at that time with about 1,400 inhabitants, compared to the less than 600 today.

It was a society where life, politics, and religion walked intimately intertwined. The day unfolded in the shadow of the church and to the voice of the bell; the tolls of dawn, noon, and dusk marked the daily rhythm; the Sunday Mass and the praying of vespers, that of the week; and Christmas, Holy Week, Corpus Christi, and the patron saint festivities of Saint Emeterius and Saint Celedonius at the end of August, that of the year.

His parents, Epifanio Fernández and Hilaria Echeverría, educated their family with deep Christian sentiments, and five of their nine children embraced religious life. “Nine siblings, nine Christians, nine worshippers of God on earth,” Jenaro defined. In addition, eight of Jenaro’s nephews and nieces were also priests, religious brothers or sisters, three of them Augustinian Recollects.

We know little of Friar Jenaro’s youth. It is reasonable to deduce his probable collaboration in the agricultural labors of the family after the departure of his older brothers to the seminary and the illness that affected his father in his last years of life.

The love for the family penetrated to the most recondite depths of Jenaro’s heart, and that from October 1922, when he entered the apostolic school of the Augustinian Recollects in Ágreda (Soria), only on rare occasions and sporadically could he share his life with them. Only from 1950 could visits be somewhat more frequent.

This did not compromise his relationship with his siblings and nephews, nor did it diminish his interest in their affairs or cool his filial affection. His letters were frequent; and his remembrance in prayer, continuous. In 1990 his niece Cándida recalled emotionally that his visits were warm, full of affection and spontaneity.

Jenaro learned in his family to give a Christian orientation to his life and to discover in it the will of God. In it he drank two of his favorite devotions: that of the Sacred Heart and that of Saint Joseph; and in his vocation his brother Saturnino played an important role: “my brother Saturnino was a priest of angelic purity. How much he has influenced my soul!”.

We review below, in eight chapters, his adult life: in the first two, his formation as a religious, priest, and canonist; and then the different roles and tasks that his religious community and the Church requested of him: historical research, the apostolate, advising, the study of the charism and Augustinian-Recollect spirituality, his participation in the Second Vatican Council, and support for post-conciliar consecrated life.