In the afternoon of February 18, the General Council accepted the resignation of Norbert Escobar Guzmán from the office of Prior Provincial of Our Lady of Candelaria. The said resignation took place two days before -and five days after that of Benedict XVI-, on account of the worsening of heart pain that he was complaining since November 2009, while he was governing the Recollect Province of Colombia.
Norberto Escobar, 78 years old, is automatically substituted in the office by Jairo Soto Moreno, who up to the moment was the Vicar Provincial. This Bogotano, who is 61 years old, consequently, will take charge of organizing the forthcoming Provincial Chapter of Candelaria, which will start on November 1, 2013 in El Desierto de Candelaria (Boyacá), the convent where the American branch of the Recollection was born in the year 1604.
Soto Moreno is licensed in Biblical Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He has been a professor of Sacred Scripture in the Theological Center of the Province, and is doing the same task in the Uniagustiniana, the University the Order founded in Colombia in 2007. Among other assignments of responsibilities within the community, he has been a Provincial Treasurer, as well as Councilor and Vicar Provincial. At present, and from the year 2000, he was the Prior and Parish Priest of the community of the Colegio Agustiniano Norte, Bogotá.
The Order in Colombia
The Province of Our Lady of Candelaria is composed of 109 religious, almost all are Colombians, and possesses in Colombia 22 communities, plus three in Chile. Actually it takes care of 19 parishes and directs 7 colleges, besides the Uniagustiana. Among the various bishops it has given to the Church, at present there are three who are still alive: Olavio López Duque, resigned auxiliary bishop of Bogotá; Alejandro Castaño Arbeláez, Bishop of Cartago (Valle Cauca) and Hector Javier Pizarro Acevedo, Prelate and Apostolic Vicar of Trinidad, in Casanare, this last one is a mission territory that the Augustinian Recollects were attending by their presence for the past three and a half centuries.
Her most important personage is Saint Ezequiel Moreno, who in 1888 restored the Province, and later on was named Vicar Apostolic of Casanare (1894) and Bishop of Pasto (1896), becoming the defender of the Catholic Cause in Colombia during the last years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.