On the 19th of March the first stone of the Hogar St. Monica was blessed and laid. With this gesture the Augustinian Recollect community began the building of the first of the houses that will welcome children and young people who have been victims of sexual abuse and exploitation.
The Hogar is in the CEU, or Condominio Espiritual Uirapurú. This first house is just the start of a wider Project that will have nine houses of welcome with capacity for 100 adolescents, a centre for administration, health and psycho-social attention; another building for art courses and professional training, a large library, a chapel, other multiuse rooms, a sports field and a house for a religious community and volunteers.
Who took part in the blessing of the project? The religious and seminarians of the Recollect community, the Sisters from the Third Order, and some from the CEU. The service started with listening to the Word of God. Then Fr. José Alberto Moreno, who is in charge of the Project, said a few words in which he thanked God for bringing the Recollects to that place and permitting them to be part of the larger family of the CEU, by giving them a mission: to bring life to young people who have been sexually abused and exploited.
Then Sister Lucilia Maria Valença de Freitas, president of CEU (Condominio Espiritual Uirapurú) said a few words. She reminded everyone that the Recollects becoming part of CEU was the fruit of and answer to their prayers. She thanked God for this new work that was starting in CEU and praised the charism of the Augustinian Recollects as builders of unity and communion.
She finished encouraging one and all to follow the example of Monica and Augustine, always searching for God with one heart and soul. The superior of the community, Santiago Sánchez, blessed the foundation stone and all those gathered there.
The Condominio Espiritual Uirapurú (CEU) was born in the year 2000, out of a dream to place a visible sign of God’s presence in the very heart of Fortaleza. The nineteen entities that make up the CEU are involved in many activities: spiritual, educational, cultural, and social among others and in living in unity through the sharing and integration of the diversity of charisms in favour of the people who want to get their life back again.
At present ten entities are now established in CEU giving attention, depending on their possibilities, to those people who seek their services : street children, drug addicts, ex prisoners, alcoholics, children and adults with Aids, young exploited people, abandoned women, elderly priests….are just some of the lives that are remade within the great spiritual lung that CEU has become for the city of Fortaleza.